A month of posts from one piece you’ve already written

Somewhere in your files sits a piece that took you weeks: a report, a long article, the script of a talk, a project write-up. It went out once to a handful of readers and has sat in a folder since. Meanwhile you’d like to post more often, on LinkedIn, in a newsletter or on your team’s intranet, but a blank page every week is hard to face, so your content calendar stays empty. You can skip the blank page: the thinking is already done, and what’s left is cutting it into short posts that still sound like you.

An AI assistant does that cutting quickly. Left alone, it also writes openings that could belong to anyone and slips in figures your piece never mentions, so this method ties every post to a sentence in your source and keeps two jobs for you: the example from your own work and the first line. It works the same in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, for anyone who keeps a channel going alongside the day job: a manager, a consultant, a small business owner, a trainer, a researcher, or the one person who handles communications at a nonprofit or a public agency.

By the end of this you’ll have eight posts drafted from one piece, checked against it and scheduled two a week for the next four weeks, plus a voice card and two prompts ready for next month’s piece.

What you’ll be able to do

• Pull 8 to 12 separate ideas out of one long piece, each tied to the sentence it came from.
• Turn eight of them into posts in your own voice, each with an example from your work that only you could write.
• Catch every figure or claim the assistant added before anything goes out.
• Finish today with eight posts scheduled across four weeks, and a voice card and two prompts saved for next month.

What you need

• One piece you wrote, or have the right to reuse, ideally 1,000 words or more: a report, a long article, a talk’s script, a project write-up, a training handout. If it’s still in your head, Why your AI drafts sound generic shows how to get it out by answering an assistant’s questions.
• A chat assistant (a free plan is enough) and a way to schedule: your channel’s own scheduler, a scheduling tool or your calendar (see “Where to schedule” below).
• About an hour, a little more the first time. Note when you start and when the eighth post is scheduled: that’s your number to beat next month. If you have less time today, stop at four posts and schedule two weeks; that’s still a finished result.
• For a first run, use a piece that’s already public. If yours is unpublished or names clients or colleagues, read Before you upload a client document before you paste it in.

Steps

1. Pick the source and the reader. One piece, one channel. Write a line about who reads that channel, for example “owners of small manufacturing firms, reading on their phone between meetings”. It goes into prompt 1 and your voice card, and it decides which ideas make the cut.
2. Pull out the ideas. In a new conversation, paste prompt 1 (below) with your text at the end. Each idea comes back with a type and the passage it came from, word for word. Search your document for a few words of each passage, and cross out any idea whose passage isn’t there.
3. Choose eight that stand alone. Keep the ones a reader would follow without the source, and drop near-duplicates. Mix the types so the month isn’t eight findings in a row, and favor ideas you can add something to: a customer’s question, a mistake you made, what happened when you tried it. If the piece only gives you five good ones, schedule five and fill the other slots from your next piece.
4. Fill in your voice card. Copy the template below. If you’ve posted before, open your two favorite posts and write down what they do: length, how they start, how they end. If you wrote a style card for replies, its “How we sound” lines are a good start. Every rule you write here is one less thing to fix in eight drafts.
5. Draft the posts. In the same conversation, paste prompt 2 with your card and your eight ideas. Each draft has a gap marked [MY EXAMPLE], and a list at the end flags any sentence that goes beyond its source.
6. Add your example and rewrite the first line. Fill each gap with one or two sentences from your own work. No assistant can write this part, and it’s what makes a reader stop. If you have nothing for a post, swap it for an idea you set aside. Then rewrite every first line yourself: in most feeds the first few lines are all anyone sees before deciding to read on, and it’s where the assistant’s drafts sound most alike.
7. Check every post against the source. Underline each figure, name, date and claim, and find it in your document. Whatever you can’t find goes, unless you confirm it in a reliable source and link to it. Open every link. Then read the eight in a row, out loud if you can, and change any that start or end the same way.
8. Schedule them. Two a week for four weeks makes eight. Pick two fixed slots, for example Tuesday and Thursday mornings, note the dates in your document and schedule each post. If one more tool feels like too much, put each post in a calendar reminder and publish it by hand.
9. Look back after a month. Next to each post, note what it brought in: comments, replies, messages, a mention in a meeting. Replies tell you more than likes. Next month, paste the posts that started conversations into the optional line of prompt 1.

Three things to copy

Prompt 1, the ideas

Below is a [report / article / talk] I wrote for [its original readers]. I want to turn it into short posts for [channel], read by [your reader line from step 1].

Read all of it, then list up to 12 separate ideas from it. Each idea must make sense to someone who hasn't read the rest.

For each idea give:
- Idea: the point in one sentence.
- Type: finding, how-to, mistake to avoid, number, story, or question people ask.
- Source: the sentence or two it comes from, copied word for word.

Rules:
- Use only what is in the text. Add no facts, figures, examples or opinions.
- No two ideas may make the same point.
- If the text has fewer than 12 good ideas, give fewer and say so.

[Optional, from month two: these past posts got the most replies: ... Favor ideas like them.]

TEXT:
[paste your text here]

The voice card

MY VOICE ON [CHANNEL]
(Example: a made-up independent HR consultant. Replace every line with your own.)

Reader: owners of companies with 10 to 50 staff, reading on their phone.
Length: 80 to 150 words. Short paragraphs. One idea per post.
First line: the specific thing (a number, a mistake, a client's question). Never a greeting or a statement about the world in general.
Words I use: people, team, new hire, first week, paperwork.
Words I never use: thrilled, excited to share, hack, must-read, "in today's world".
Questions: at most one, at the end, and only if I want to read the answers.
Hashtags: two at most, at the end.
Emoji and exclamation marks: none.
Links: one at most, to the full piece, in the last line.
Sign-off: none.

Prompt 2, the drafts

Write one post for each idea below, following my voice card exactly.

For each post:
- Use only the idea and its source passage. No facts, figures, names, quotes or results that aren't in the source.
- Include one line that reads [MY EXAMPLE: ...] and says what kind of example from my own work would fit there. I'll write it myself. Don't invent one.
- Vary the shape: a short story, a plain statement, a short list, a number first. No two posts may open or end the same way.

After the posts, list every sentence that says more than its source passage, so I can check it.

VOICE CARD:
[paste your card]

IDEAS AND SOURCE PASSAGES:
[paste the eight you chose]

A worked example (made up)

For example, Ana coordinates volunteers at a food bank (both invented for this example) and wrote a twelve-page annual report that only the board read. One idea from prompt 1:

Idea: Volunteers who quit in their first month mostly say they never knew who to ask.

Source: “Of the volunteers who left in their first month, most told us they had never been sure who to ask when something came up.”

The assistant’s draft opened with “Volunteer retention is one of the biggest challenges nonprofits face” and left the line [MY EXAMPLE: something you changed after hearing this]. Ana rewrote the first line and filled the gap:

This year, when a volunteer left us in their first month, we asked why. Most gave the same answer: they never knew who to ask.

Since March, every new volunteer gets my number and a text from me after their first shift.

The check took one more line out: the assistant had added that “most people quit within 90 days”, which the report never says. The same method works for a sales manager’s quarterly review, a teacher’s write-up of a new unit or an engineer’s post-project notes; only the reader line and the voice card change.

Where to schedule

Checked in October 2026. Menus change, so if a name doesn’t match, look for a clock or calendar icon next to the post button.

• LinkedIn, personal profile: click Start a post, write it, click the clock icon at the lower right, choose a date and time, then Next and Schedule. It must be between 10 minutes and three months away. To see the queue, open Start a post, click the clock icon and choose View all scheduled posts.
• LinkedIn Page: from the Page’s admin view, choose Page posts, then Start a post and the schedule icon at the lower right. Page posts need at least an hour’s notice, up to three months; posts with several photos, polls and reshares can’t be scheduled.
• Facebook and Instagram: Meta Business Suite, Meta’s own tool for managing a business on both, lets you create and schedule posts.
• Several channels at once: a scheduling tool such as Buffer, whose free plan connects up to three channels with up to ten scheduled posts per channel at a time, enough for this month’s eight on one channel.
• An email newsletter or internal news: most email tools can schedule a send; look next to the send button.

What can go wrong and how to check

Eight posts with the same shape

Assistants tend to settle into one pattern: a striking first line, three short lines, a question at the end. One such post is fine; eight in a month look automated. Rewriting the first lines (step 6) and reading aloud (step 7) catch most of it; for the rest, ask for two of the posts again, one as a short story and one as a plain list.

Figures that aren’t in the source

The addition that does the most harm is a figure with no source: “studies show”, a percentage nobody can trace. Step 7 and the list at the end of prompt 2 catch them; if a figure isn’t in your document, delete it or find the original and link to it.

Hashtags, links and images

Drafts pile hashtags at the end even when the card says two; delete the extras. Open every link from the scheduled post’s preview, and point it at a public page, never a file in your drive that asks for access. For images, your own photos and charts are the easiest choice; anything else needs a license that allows reuse.

Where to go next

You have a month scheduled and everything you need to repeat it. Next month, run the same prompts on another piece and time yourself against today’s number.

To stop pasting the card into every chat, save it where your assistant reads it before each conversation, as in Set up your AI assistant once, and keep the two prompts with the others you reuse, as in Keep your best prompts in one place. And the piece you just took apart has more in it: Turn a long report into a ten-minute presentation builds a talk from the same source, and a short glossary keeps your terms steady if you translate the eight posts for readers in another language.