I think we keep trusting the wrong version of ourselves.

When we ask how much time we should spend on social media for our business, we usually answer with a number of hours. Four hours tomorrow. Ten this week. And then we plan as if every one of those hours is the same, and as if the person doing the work will be running at 100% the whole time.

You won’t be. I’m certainly not.

There is a version of me who sits down to plan the week and apparently believes I’m about to become a completely different person. She has good intentions. She is also VERY ambitious. I call her octopus Tinna, because she clearly has eight arms.

The problem is that real Tinna is the one who has to execute octopus Tinna’s plans.

Why does my content plan never fit into my week?

Octopus Tinna can make three carousels, film four videos, answer everyone in the community, finish the new training, send two emails, do client work and somehow be completely finished by 3pm.

I’m fairly sure she forgets I have to pick my son up from school before that.

Real Tinna has a little more laundry. 23 more emails to answer. A couple of small things that need attention and never make it into a plan because they feel too small to write down.

And then the week actually happens. Someone needs something. A call goes over. The school sends an email. Something that was supposed to take 20 minutes takes 90. I’ve slept like sh*t. Mapple, our dog, decides today is the perfect day to develop a limp that disappears the second we walk into the vet.

None of that is drama. It’s a completely normal Tuesday.

But because the plan was written for someone who doesn’t exist, the normal Tuesday feels like failing. We look at the list on Friday with half of it still sitting there and decide we’re bad at consistency. Or bad at time management. Or that we need a better app.

Usually we just need a plan written for the person who’s actually going to do it.

How many hours a week should I spend on content?

I’ll be honest… I can’t give you a number that works for everyone, and I’d be a bit suspicious of anyone who says they can.

What I can tell you is mine. I usually have about 20 hours of active work a week for my business. Not 20 hours of content. 20 hours for everything. Content, the community, emails, client work, admin, the training I keep promising myself I’ll finish.

And if that sounds small, count your own. A lot of us have roughly the same… we’ve just been planning like we have 45.

So before you ask how much time you should spend on social media, I’d ask something else first. How much time do you actually have for the business? I mean the hours that you, on a normal week with normal interruptions, can realistically work. That’s usually fewer than the calendar says.

Then content gets a slice of that. It doesn’t get the whole thing, because the rest of the business still needs feeding. Someone has to answer the emails and deliver the thing people paid for.

Why aren’t all hours the same when planning content?

When we sit down to plan, we tend to calculate using AVAILABLE HOURS.

I have four hours tomorrow, so I can fit four hours of work into tomorrow.

Except those four hours are not four identical little Tetris blocks that slot neatly into each other.

The first hour after decent sleep is not the same as the hour after three calls. Writing something that needs original thought does not cost me the same as answering emails. And having two free hours on paper does not automatically mean my brain has two hours of creative work left in it.

Think about the last time you had a free afternoon after a morning of meetings. You probably sat down to write a caption with the best intentions and ended up reorganising your Canva folders for 40 minutes. That wasn’t laziness. Your brain had already spent the good stuff before lunch.

This is where I think capacity gets really interesting. Time is not the only thing that needs budgeting. Your brain needs a budget too.

How do I plan content with limited time?

Look, I’m not saying planning goes out the window. I plan every week. I just plan very differently now.

I sort my work by what it costs me, not only by how long it takes. Some tasks need the fresh, rested version of me. Writing a carousel from scratch, planning something new, recording anything where I have to think on camera. Other tasks are fine for the tired version. Replying to comments, scheduling, editing something that’s already written, answering emails.

The fresh hours are the expensive ones, and I don’t get many of them. Maybe the first two or three hours of a good morning. So those go to the thinking work, and I protect them like they’re the last biscuit in the packet.

The rest of the week gets the lighter jobs. And I leave gaps. Actual empty space in the plan, because something will always take 90 minutes instead of 20, and I’d rather it eat into a gap than into Thursday’s carousel.

Then I plan less than I think I can do. Every single time. If octopus Tinna says five posts, real Tinna writes down three and is pleasantly surprised when there’s room for a fourth.

And the content has to be decided before I sit down to make it. If I’m using my two good hours to work out what to talk about, I’ve spent the most expensive time I have on a decision I could have made once, weeks earlier, on a slow afternoon with a cup of tea. That’s what a plan is for. It’s there so the good hours go to making the bloody thing.

Can my content plan survive a bad week?

After years of creating content for my business, I’m not particularly interested in a system that only works when I’m operating at 100%.

Because I’m almost never at 100%. Nobody is. There’s always a kid home sick, a client who needs something today, a dog with a very dramatic limp, or a week where the bloody inbox decides to explode.

A plan that only works when everything goes right isn’t really a plan. It’s a wish list with dates on it.

What I need is something that survives a completely normal, unpredictable week. Because at the end of the day, real Tinna is the one who has to keep the business running. Octopus Tinna writes lovely plans and then disappears.

So I’d rather have a plan that’s a little boring and actually gets done than an exciting one that makes me feel like rubbish by Wednesday.

And if you’ve had a run of weeks where nothing went to plan, I’d look at the plan before you look at yourself. It was probably written for someone with eight arms.

What to do this week

• Write down how many hours you actually worked on the business last week. Not what you planned. What happened.
• Split your content tasks into thinking work and doing work.
• Find your two or three best hours of the week and give them to the thinking work only.
• Plan about 70% of what you think you can do, and leave the rest empty on purpose.
• Decide what you’re posting before the week starts, so the good hours go to making it.
• On Friday, check what got done and shape next week’s plan around the real you.

How many hours do you actually have for your business? I’d bloody love to know.

Want a plan built for the real you?

This is a big part of what we do inside The Content Engine. We start with your business and the hours you genuinely have, then build a content plan that fits into that week instead of the fantasy one.

You plan week by week, there’s a live call every week, and the community is there on weekdays when you get stuck or when the week goes sideways (which it will).

If you’re tired of writing plans for the octopus version of you, come and have a look at The Content Engine.