Creating Content: The Daily Dilemma of Quality vs. Quantity

I love creating content and sharing my experiences. And it really does help to make it a daily habit. For example, this summer I had a month where I posted something on Instagram every single day. And although that was really fun and it got my creative juices flowing, I can’t help but wonder whether it makes sense to focus that much on quantity.

Now let’s first explore the other side of the spectrum here: creating content on an irregular basis. The largest risk if you take this path is that you might end up creating nothing at all. It’s like when I first started going to the gym and I thought going 3 times a week was probably ok. And before I knew it I wasn’t going to the gym at all anymore... The way I fixed this was by starting to go to the gym every morning, first thing in the morning at 6am. Now that did work!

Let’s explore some possible solutions. And this is mainly for when you personally want to create content on a regular basis. In a business context you can always hire someone who’s sole job it is to create content, in which case quality daily content should be less of a challenge.

So back to you, aspirant content creator! Maybe an approach like a writer could be better? A writer can write every single day, but she sure as hell doesn’t publish a book a day! One blog I really enjoy here is Paul Stamatiou’s personal blog. His posts are very infrequent, but incredibly in-depth.

Or we can accept that sharing a snippet is also sharing something. In other words, it doesn’t always need to be a full feature article. A great example of this is Seth Godin’s blog. He publishes a post every single day of the year. Sometimes it’s one paragraph, sometimes it’s ten!

Since this article is also me thinking out loud and trying to figure out some things, I think I’ll just try to be creative everyday but not necessarily share it with the world. One day I might go out and take some nice photos, another day I might sit down in a coffee shop and jot down some thoughts. Who knows, one day I might even try to draw something, which has probably been since I was in middle school!

What I feel is the most important lesson here is that you should try to create at least once a day without feeling the need to share it with the world. I think a creative outlet is something we need as a human, something that triggers parts of our brain that we otherwise don’t really use that much. And eventually you’ll always be able to figure it out.