Content calendar

This page is a workbook. Fill in each section to define your own calendar standard, and expand a concept review for the reasoning. Grayed E.g. text is a placeholder to replace. Examples use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology.

The calendar does not live on this page. It is a live artifact with a row per item, edited daily, read as filtered views. Keep it in a scheduling tool, a database, or a spreadsheet, and link it below. This page defines what a row looks like and what the statuses mean, the same way the creative drive defines the folder rather than holding the files.

A. Where it is

Field	Fill in
Location	E.g. [link], the Content database in Notion
Owner	E.g. Marco Silva
Who can add a row	E.g. Anyone in marketing
Who can change a date after it is committed	E.g. The owner only
Scheduling tool, if separate	E.g. Buffer. The calendar is the plan; Buffer is the queue
Where published URLs come back to	E.g. The same row, filled in after publishing

Concept review: Where it is

Two tools are common here and they do different jobs. A calendar holds the plan, including things that have no asset yet and things that were considered and dropped. A scheduler holds the queue: finished posts with a send time. Teams that use only the scheduler lose everything upstream of a finished asset, which is where planning actually happens.The row about who can move a committed date is the one that decides whether the calendar means anything. A date anybody can change is a suggestion, and a channel planned on suggestions drifts back to whoever posts most often.

B. The columns

Confirm the columns every row carries. Keep the ones that fit, cut the ones you would not fill in.

Column	What it holds	Example
Title	A short working name for the item	E.g. Setup-in-an-afternoon carousel
Channel	Where it publishes	E.g. Instagram
Format	The production job it implies	E.g. Carousel
Publish date and time	When it goes out	E.g. 2026-04-22, 09:00
Anchored to	What the date was chosen relative to	E.g. Google flight launch, 22 Apr
Sequence	Its position, if part of a set	E.g. 1 of 3
Message pillar	The pillar it carries	E.g. Pillar 2, one source of truth
Campaign	The marketing campaign, if any	E.g. Fresh Batch spring trial
Owner	One name	E.g. Marco Silva
Status	See section C	E.g. Scheduled
Brief	Link to the post brief or article brief	E.g. [link]
Published URL	Filled in after it goes live	E.g. [link]
[add column]

Don’t copy the caption, the creative direction, or the UTM string into the calendar. Those live in the brief, and a second copy is a second thing to update. The calendar links to the brief; it does not restate it.

Concept review: The columns

Most of these are self-explanatory bookkeeping. Two are not.Anchored to is what separates a calendar from a list of dates. A date records when something publishes; an anchor records what that date was chosen relative to. When a paid flight moves a week, a calendar of bare dates gives no way to tell which rows should move with it, and someone re-derives the whole plan from memory. With anchors it is a filter.Sequence exists because a set of posts is a single argument delivered in parts. Three posts supporting a flight have an order, and the order carries meaning: warm the audience, run alongside the ads, close out. A calendar that shows three unrelated rows on three dates has lost the thing that made them a set, and whoever picks the work up will publish them in whatever order the assets are ready.Message pillar is worth the column for the reason organic social already gives: posts planned as standalone ideas drift from what the brand is trying to say, one reasonable-looking post at a time.

C. Statuses

Define what each status means and who moves a row into it.

Status	Means	Who sets it
E.g. Idea	E.g. Proposed, no date committed, may never run	E.g. Anyone
E.g. Planned	E.g. Date committed, brief not written	E.g. Owner
E.g. In production	E.g. Brief written, creative or copy in progress	E.g. Item owner
E.g. Approved	E.g. Cleared per the approval process, ready to schedule	E.g. Approver
E.g. Scheduled	E.g. Loaded into the scheduler with a send time	E.g. Item owner
E.g. Published	E.g. Live, URL filled in	E.g. Item owner
E.g. Dropped	E.g. Decided against. Row kept, with a one-line reason	E.g. Owner
[add status]

Concept review: Statuses

The two statuses teams tend to leave out are the two that do the most work.Idea gives a place for something that is not committed. Without it, an idea either gets a date it does not deserve, which fills the calendar with work nobody decided to do, or it lives in someone’s notes and is lost. A calendar that only holds committed work quietly becomes a calendar that commits to everything.Dropped keeps the record of what was considered and rejected. Deleting the row instead means the same idea comes back next quarter with the same enthusiasm and no memory of why it was dropped the first time. One line of reason is enough.

D. Cadence and capacity

Field	Fill in
Planning cadence	E.g. Monthly, one session, four weeks ahead
How far ahead dates are committed	E.g. Two weeks firm, four weeks planned
Target volume per channel	E.g. Instagram 3 a week, LinkedIn 2 a week
What we will not fill	E.g. A slot with no objective. An empty week beats a filler post
Who reviews the plan	E.g. Marco Silva and the brand lead, at the monthly session

Concept review: Cadence and capacity

A target volume is useful as a planning constraint and dangerous as a quota. The difference shows up in what happens when a week is short: a constraint lets the week be short, a quota gets it filled.This is worth deciding explicitly because the pressure only runs one way. Nobody is ever asked why the calendar had a gap that turned out fine. Writing down that an empty slot is an acceptable outcome is what gives whoever runs the session something to point at.Committing dates in two horizons, firm and planned, tends to work better than one. It lets the near term be reliable enough to produce against while the further term stays cheap to change.

E. When something moves

Situation	What happens
The thing a row is anchored to moves	E.g. Filter by anchor, move every row with it, keep the gaps between them
A single item slips	E.g. Owner moves it, notes the new date. If it is part of a sequence, the rest move too
An item is dropped after production started	E.g. Status to Dropped with a reason, and the finished asset goes to the creative drive so the work is not lost
Something urgent has to go out	E.g. It gets a row before it publishes, even if the row is written the same morning

A post published without a calendar row is invisible to everything downstream: the retrospective, the channel report, and the next planning session. If the process has to be broken for something urgent, the row is what gets written afterwards, not skipped.

Content calendar concepts Why the calendar records anchors and sequence.
Planning the content calendar The recurring workflow that fills it.
Organic social post brief The per-post record a row links to.
Article brief The other producer of rows.
Messaging Where message pillars are defined.
Asset directory Every location in one index.

Brand guidelines

Naming and tracking

Creative standards

Content standards

Reporting standards

Experiment and pilot standards

Customer profiles

Campaigns and products

A. Where it is

B. The columns

C. Statuses

D. Cadence and capacity

E. When something moves

​A. Where it is

​B. The columns

​C. Statuses

​D. Cadence and capacity

​E. When something moves

​Related resources

A. Where it is

B. The columns

C. Statuses

D. Cadence and capacity

E. When something moves

Related resources