Finding examples to use in your course can be a never-ending time sink — Here’s four ways to find them in minutes

Since 2016, I’ve created 11 courses while having a demanding job, a wife, and two kids.

I had little time to spare. And I didn’t do it by burning the midnight oil. Nor did I have a team to help me. I figured out how to be more efficient.

Finding good examples was the slowest step.

So I created strategies to find them fast. Here are the four you can use every time:

Strategy 1: Your work

If you’ve done the task before, show your work as an example of how it is done well. This isn’t egotistical at all. It’s good teaching.

Strategy 2: Your client’s work

Have you taught anyone before? Do you have their work? If so, use those examples to teach your topic. If you don’t have their work but can reconstruct it, that helps too.

Strategy 3: Work you admire

Not all examples have to be from you or your students. You can source examples from others’ work as well. When you can find your concept “in the wild,” it shows how widely applicable it is.

Strategy 4: Create the example

If you don’t have an example, create it. In the course I’m building now, I didn’t have an example of how to use the Three Part Formula for outlining a course. So I applied the formula to a future course and used that as my example.

Finding good examples can be hard, but it gets much easier when you have these four options.