‘Office timings’ for a content creator

— even Michael Scott doesn’t know the answer.

The new-age digital celebrities are often faced with questions, most of which boil down to — “10-sec reels, a post that takes a minute to upload on the feed, stories that you can upload within seconds, and DMs that you can clear within minutes — toh phir karte kya hon pura din?”

Well, the question is simple, the logic behind it is rational but it isn’t reality, is it?

The thing about content creation is that it’s not a structured 9–5 job, it cannot be — content creation is a process, it’s happening when you’re eating, humming a jingle that you just made up over your love for cereal, it’s even happening when you’re sleeping — when you get a wild dream and decide to journal and convert it into a full-time script the next day.

When you make a 10-second reel on Instagram, it’s not visible that you put 2 hours into it or that it took you 50 shots, when you post a meme it’s not apparent you spent a considerable amount of effort into making it original yet appealing and when you create a story, it’s not obvious the thought you put behind it in order to interact with your audience — the work is not visible.

And this is something most people in other creative professions will agree with as well, it’s that creativity isn’t a tap — you cannot churn out ideas after ideas with the expectation of them all being great like you crunch numbers in say an accountant’s job: you spend an hour coming up with ten ideas and maybe one or two will actually make it or if the day isn’t particularly a productive one, maybe you’re completely stuck for ideas and all you can tell yourself is “tomorrow will be a better day”

And just like in any other job where you have to constantly work towards re-inventing yourself to sustain in the industry — the same is true in “the industry of the internet” but this “re-inventing” and “staying relevant” is much more frequent and happens on an almost daily basis — meme formats on the internet change every 2 days, trends fade away and new ones appear every week, new lingo is getting added every day, the style of humor changes before you can even realize it and before you know it, the internet that you knew, say 2 years back isn’t the internet that you know now.

A celebrity makes a preposterous statement and you must seize that moment right away to make a meme on it, breaking headlines appears and you must get to work to leverage content out of it, a minor convenience on the internet and you must get online to debate it in the comment section — all this counts for “staying relevant”.

Content creation and working towards growing your page is, therefore, more of a continuous process rather than scheduled tasks or to put it simply: content creators do not see content curation as a task or maybe even as a “job” but as a medium to express that if things go in their favor, it can turn into a form of monetization.

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Cover Image : https://dribbble.com/shots/14363167-Celebrating-the-Creators