Why I Had to Fix My Content Workflow Again
Every few weeks, my content system collapses under its own weight. Not dramatically, just quietly. Like suddenly realizing I forgot which Google Doc had the actual blog draft — not the idea list, not version 1. The draft-draft. The one I actually started writing. Sooner or later, I always end up rebuilding things from scratch again. This post is basically a breadcrumb trail for future me (and maybe you) the next time I yell “WHERE DID I PUT THAT ARTICLE ABOUT ZAPIER ERRORS?!”
Right now I’m keeping my blog ideas and half-finished drafts somewhat organized using a weird combo of Google Docs, Notion, Airtable, and a free sticky note tool called Milanote. The irony: I write about automation but organize my stuff like a raccoon that found a filing cabinet.
Using Google Docs But Not Relying on Folders
Let me start by saying I use Google Docs on a daily basis, but I’ve stopped relying on folders to organize blog content. You’d think folders would be obvious. Drafts go in /Drafts. Published posts go in /Published. Yeah, that completely fell apart.
The problem is Docs doesn’t really treat folders in a consistent way when you’re bouncing between Drive, Docs, and mobile. For example:
– If you create a new Doc directly from Google Drive, you can pick the folder.
– If you press the New blank doc button inside Docs, it doesn’t ask you where to save it — it just drops it into My Drive.
– If you use voice typing in Chrome to dictate most of your first draft (which I often do while walking around), you’ll forget to organize it until later. Except by then, you’ve already lost track of which draft it was.
So now, instead of trying to make folders work, I create one giant Doc called ***LIVE DRAFTS*** and type all topic notes directly in there. Each post starts with a level 1 heading (Ctrl+Alt+1) and I use the Outline view to jump between sections. I still create separate documents once I get past the midpoint, but the important part is that early ideas never get isolated in mystery files titled “automationblog_final_rewrite2”.
Quick Idea Capturing with Notion on Mobile
Notion has become the fastest place for me to stash random blog thoughts when I’m not at my desk. It’s not elegant, and syncing between desktop and mobile sometimes lags by 30 seconds or so (esp if I’m bouncing WiFi), but it’s still better than trying to open Docs on a phone. Here’s what I do:
– I have a Notion page called “Raw Topics”
– Inside it, I use a toggle list for each rough category (e.g., automation bugs, Zapier setups, ghostwriting, tools I broke again)
– Under those toggles, I add sentences whenever something dumb happens that might be worth writing up later. Like the time I connected an Airtable record to a Google Sheets Zap, but the spreadsheet ID kept changing every time I duplicated the base 🙃
Notion does one thing better than most: pressing Enter keeps the formatting you’re using. Tiny thing, but when dumping 10 messy bullets on mobile, it helps.
Tracking Draft Stages in Airtable
For the actual production side — deciding what I’m writing this week, what’s ready to publish, what needs editing — I use a free Airtable base. I’ve rebuilt it three times this year already because each time I add more views until it’s a mess I no longer understand.
Right now, I have these fields:
– **Post Title** (single line text)
– **Category** (multiple select: Workflow, Tools, Automation Failures, etc)
– **Status** (select: Idea, Drafting, Needs Edits, Scheduled, Done)
– **Link to Google Doc** (URL)
I have one view filtered to only show status = “Drafting” and another kanban view for high-speed overview. What’s especially broken (and somehow useful?) is that I use a formula field to add a red ⚠️ if a post has no linked Doc and it’s been in Drafting for more than a week. The formula is ugly:
“`
IF(AND(Status=’Drafting’, IS_BEFORE({Last Updated}, DATEADD(TODAY(), -7, ‘days’))), ‘⚠️’, ”)
“`
The trick is, it only works if I manually update the “Last Updated” field, which defeats the point. I tried using automations to update that on edit but the formula then fails silently 🧐
Airtable is like a whiteboard you keep trying to turn into a robot assistant — fun until it says “There’s a problem with your formula” with no further info.
Using Milanote as a Visual Sideboard
Milanote is basically a virtual corkboard with sticky notes, arrows, and random image pins. I don’t use it for structured drafting, but I rely on it as my visual “what am I mentally chewing on” board.
Every couple weeks, I dump whatever’s cluttering my brain onto a board titled “Mental Queue.” Post ideas, broken workflows, half-baked templates that never got automated — they go here. Each sticky note is roughly one idea, and moving them around physically helps me group related posts. No automation, no fields, no checkboxes. Just… stuff everywhere.
Why not use Trello? Because Trello started arguing with my browser extensions. Milanote hasn’t yet. And it still feels more tactile.
Also, this is the only space I let myself add scribbles like:
– “Zaps triggering backwards again 😤”
– “Airtable date field parsing weird in Make — maybe timezones?”
When I re-read this board, I often spot patterns I missed the first time — like, oh, three of these blog drafts are basically about the same issue: upstream automation breaking silently.
Google Keep Is Still My Blog Idea Inbox
Yes, I still use Google Keep. No, it doesn’t scale well. But as an ultra-fast inbox for random passing ideas, it’s undefeated.
Here’s how I survive with it:
– Every blog idea goes into one master note titled “BLOG TOPICS RAW”
– I never use checkboxes because I found myself accidentally checking them and archiving posts I hadn’t written yet
– I pin it to the top and occasionally email myself contents when I’m clearing ideas out
You can color notes, but it turns out I always forget what the colors mean. So now everything’s yellow. ☀️
Oddly, the new Keep widget for Android made a huge difference — I can now open my note with two taps and start typing. It means I actually capture stuff like “huh, the webhook test fired twice but there’s no retry log?” before I forget what I was trying to solve.
Cross Referencing Stuff Using Dummy Calendar Events
This is wild, but I often use my Google Calendar to store meta-context about blog content. Basically, I create all-day events with titles like:
– “Zapier broken again — June failure logs”
– “Write Make.com webhook chain explanation”
Then inside the event description, I paste links to multiple sources:
– Related Google Docs
– Screnshots I uploaded to Drive
– Comments dumped from Notion or Keep
It’s not elegant at all — and the calendar gets cluttered — but seeing things on a timeline actually helps. Like, I’ll notice that two broken zap incidents happened within 3 days of each other and it nudges me to ask: was there an upstream API change that week?
Sometimes I also create repeating dummy events called “📝 BLOG WINDOW” as a fake meeting block, and give it a description: “Pick a thing off the Airtable Drafting list.”
If I ignore it for too long, at least it shows up every week and bugs me with existential guilt 🙂
What I Use When Drafting Long Blog Posts
Once an idea graduates from messy draft to actual writing, I switch to plain old Google Docs — but I follow a few self-imposed rules:
1. I write in the same font I publish in (I use Roboto Mono in Docs)
2. I don’t allow comments until after the second draft
3. I never name the file until it’s about 70% done, because otherwise I get attached and forget to trash it if it sucks
Still, Google Docs loves to weirdly freeze if the Outline panel is open too long — especially on long posts with nested headings. I’ve lost more than one paragraph to an autosave hiccup. So now I just copy the doc’s contents into Notepad++ every couple hours as a manual backup.
I’ve tried more structured tools like Scrivener or Ulysses, but always returned to Docs because:
– Sharing is instant
– Comments are easy
– Version history has saved my butt more than once
Drafts-in-progress sometimes hop between four devices, and Docs is the only one that consistently reopens in the last spot I was editing. Kinda like a dog that always knows where you left your shoe.
Stuff I Tried and Gave Up On
Just to be clear, I’ve tried other tools people swear by. And they didn’t work for me. Here’s a short list:
– **Notion templates** — Too long to set up. By the time I filled out “Author” and “Focus Keyword” fields, I’d forgotten what I wanted to say. I spend more time cleaning up the template than writing.
– **Trello** — Card movement lagged, and linking to Google Docs inside cards broke formatting in mobile. Felt like bolting paper folders to a whiteboard.
– **Obsidian** — I loved the idea of backlinks, but it required a bit too much manual file organizing for my current state of half-chaos.
I may come back to these later once I remember what I was trying to solve in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯