You are the strategist, the writer, the editor, and the person who actually does the client work. Content loses that fight every week unless it has a system small enough to survive your calendar. This is that system: 90 minutes, once a week, producing five to seven pieces that sound like you.
The premise: AI is your drafting assistant, not your ghostwriter. It expands, recasts, and formats. You supply the ideas, the opinions, and the voice. Get that division of labor wrong and you'll publish more content and less of yourself. No Voice Charter yet? Start with the Context pillar and the Voice Charter Template before you build the weekly system below.
First, set your 4 content pillars
Not CAFECITO pillars: content pillars, the four topics you're willing to repeat for a year. Before the weekly system works, you need these, because "what should I post?" is the question that kills batching.
Pick four:
- Your craft. How you do the work. Methods, decisions, mistakes, tools.
- Your clients' problems. The questions they actually ask, answered in their language.
- Your point of view. Where you disagree with your industry's defaults. This is the pillar that makes you recognizable.
- Your proof. What happened when the work met reality: outcomes, before-and-afters, lessons from real projects. (Real ones only. No proof yet means this pillar publishes lessons, not results.)
Write one sentence defining each pillar for you. Every idea you ever capture gets tagged with one of the four. An idea that fits none gets deleted without guilt.
The weekly 90-minute batch
Same day, same time, every week. Protect it like a client call.
Minutes 0 to 15: Idea harvest. Open your idea inbox (a note on your phone; keep exactly one). All week you've dropped in client questions, things that annoyed you, decisions you made. Now pick ONE idea, the one you have a genuine opinion about this week. One idea per week is the whole model. It's enough, because of the repurposing map below.
Where AI fits: nowhere yet. Ideas from AI are ideas everyone else already has.
Minutes 15 to 30: The core take, by hand. Write 150 to 250 words on the idea, yourself, badly. Your claim, why you believe it, one example from your actual work. Typos welcome. This messy paragraph is the DNA of everything that follows: whatever voice is in it survives into every derivative piece. Skip this step and everything downstream goes generic, because AI will be expanding its own ideas instead of yours.
Where AI fits: still nowhere.
Minutes 30 to 70: Expand with AI. Now AI earns its seat. Paste your Brand Voice JSON (or Voice Charter plus banned words) and your core take, and run the repurposing map:
The repurposing map: 1 idea to 5 pieces
| # | Piece | Prompt shape |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Long-form anchor (blog post or newsletter, 500-800 words) | "Expand this take into [format]. Keep my phrasing wherever it survives. Add structure, not new claims." |
| 2 | LinkedIn post | "Recast the anchor for LinkedIn, 100-200 words, open with the example, not the claim." |
| 3 | Short post for X (or 2-3 of them) | "Pull the 3 sharpest standalone lines from the anchor and shape each into a single post." |
| 4 | Instagram caption or carousel outline | "Turn the anchor's main sequence into a hook line plus 5 carousel slides, under 20 words per slide." |
| 5 | Short video script (Reel/TikTok, 60-75 sec) | "Rewrite the take as spoken language. Payoff in the first 2 seconds. One example, one takeaway." |
Generate all five in one session while the context is loaded. Order matters: anchor first, everything else derives from it.
Minutes 70 to 90: The red pen. Edit all five pieces in one pass. You're checking three things: Did my opinion survive? Did any banned words creep in? Would I say the first line of each piece out loud? Fix the drafts, and when you fix the same thing twice, add the rule to your Voice JSON so next week's batch starts smarter.
Schedule everything. Done until next week.
Where AI fits, and where it never does
| Step | AI's job | Your job (non-negotiable) |
|---|---|---|
| Ideas | Nothing | Capture from real work all week |
| Core take | Nothing | Write it by hand, opinions included |
| Expansion | Drafting, recasting, formatting | Supply the JSON, pick the outputs |
| Editing | Flag banned words if asked | Final voice call on every piece |
| Publishing | Nothing | Press the button, answer the comments |
The pattern: AI touches the middle of the process, never the ends. The ends (what you think, what ships) are where you live.
Failure modes, and the patch
- "I skipped a week and the system died." Halve it, don't skip it. A 45-minute version (core take plus anchor plus one social post) keeps the habit alive.
- "My AI drafts all sound the same." Your core take is getting thinner. If step two takes you less than 5 minutes, you're summarizing, not opining.
- "I ran out of ideas." You ran out of captured ideas. Set a phone reminder after client calls: "Anything worth the inbox?" One good client question funds an entire week.
- "Engagement is flat." Check pillar balance in your last month. Solopreneurs drift toward craft posts (comfortable) and away from point-of-view posts (exposed). The exposed ones build the audience.
Run this for four weeks before judging it. The first batch takes two hours; by week four it fits in 90 minutes, because your prompts, your JSON, and your hands all know the route.