I ran 1,105 miles in 2020, which took me around 200 hours.

Scrolling 33 minutes daily on your phone adds up to about 200 hours a year, too.

A friend told me recently that they want to start a newsletter, but they don’t want it to become a large time investment.

I told them that their next newsletter “is already written.”

Re-purposing the content you’ve already posted (on social media) means less time thinking about your next email newsletter, and gives you a jump on the creative process.

Once you have everything copied and pasted into your newsletter, you can make expand on some of your ideas, or include some other photos that you didn’t share on socials.

Most of us thought nothing of posting daily to social media, sometimes multiple times per day or per hour when an awards show was on or during a major sporting event.

Most of us have years of archival material to draw from, all tucked away in our social media channels.

Your posts only reach a fraction of your followers. Probably 90% of them never saw any of this material in the first place, so don’t feel bad about re-using your own material – it’s your material!

What could you do with just 30 minutes per day that might benefit you a year from now?

• Learn how to make scenic videos of lakes using a digital camera, Zoom H6 audio recorder, and editing the whole thing in DaVinci Resolve.
• Learning a new technique related to your craft
• Journaling and meditating
• Going for a walk, a bike ride, or go scootering (thanks, Amy Walsh)
• Dancing to your favorite records (R.I.P. mom)
• We think nothing of spending an hour a day on work meetings – what if we spent 30 minutes a day on FRIEND MEETINGS?
• Start a daily 30-minute check-in video call to help everyone stay on track and encourage one another

Sometimes, these things sound like too much, but each day, we have choices: invest in ourselves or create shareholder value for corporate behemoths.

Consider that we don’t think twice about uploading our original photos and text to a platform that sells advertising around our unpaid labor while limiting the number of our friends (or potential clients) who will ever see it, thus incentivizing us to either spend more of our time (a finite resource) on the platform “engaging,” or spending actual money to “boost” our posts so more people might see it.