10 Steps in a high ROT, High Output Creator Workflow
ROT stands for Return on Time spent. Most creatives spend more time than money on their projects. A creative "product" can be a book, video, course, software, piece of furniture, sculpture, music, graphic art, quilt or newsletter. You could also consider a tweet or comment on a product. My workflow is currently "book first," but eventually, "video first" will be more productive.
Not every creative project will be for commercial gain: you can make yourself an omelet. Also, as a creator nobody owes you a living so you will probably make little to nothing for a long time even if you want to make money.
Most successful artists have a backstory of working extremely hard for a decade or more before they found financial success.
1. Take Notes in Obsidian "Second Brain"
This becomes the source of your material. NotePD is great for this as well.
2. Organize your notes into an outline for a series of products
This could be a single book or movie or a series of articles. It could also be recipes for the week, an advertising campaign, or a list of hikes you want to go on.
3. Organize your outline into mini-outlines or slide shows
4. Write Chapters of your book or scripts for your video or plan your software, etc
5. Make the product no more than 90% good and look for shortcuts: be a finisher.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. If you realize that a project sucks, you can finish it quickly at 40% good, but it is essential to finish: this is how you learn. Maybe you can pull a project out of a tailspin. You can move on to the next one.
6. Publish your product: put it into the world
Get it out into the world, whatever that looks like. Publish a Kindle Book, make a website live, sit in the chair that you made.
7. Modify your product into other products
This is the simplest for digital products. Take a book and make a course about it, take videos and write a book about it, or take a course and write a book about it. If you made a sculpture, paint it or photograph it. If you made a quilt, make a sculpture of it. If you made dinner, make dessert. Make a course about what you did.
8. Serialize your product on the Substack platform using a step by step format
Substack is a great platform, and they run subscriptions for you and also host videos. It is also free to get started. The sub stack posts become permanent advertisements for your products.
If you wrote a nonfiction book, you can just publish each chapter as a post. Link back to your product.
I did that here:
https://torusheadstudios.substack.com/p/what-are-bitmasks-and-bitwise-operators
9. Take your Substack posts and make "social media snippets" out of them
10. Use AI at every step of this process
For ideation and editing and more.
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