A few years ago, I experimented with regularly making TikToks and Reels. In the process, I experienced both dopamine hits from seeing aggressively algorithm-boosted view counts and embarrassment from noticing my brain trying to “content-fy” every little moment. Short-form videos can be fun and rewarding to create, I decided, but I didn’t want them to take over my brain and life. As I reflected on how to be more mindful and intentional about my videos, I came up with the three questions below.
1 — SUBSTANCE / Is it actually interesting?
This simple question is designed to fight the temptation to “do it just to do it”—the feeling that you have to keep feeding the platform to maintain or grow engagement. Unless the one true goal of your work is to go viral and/or grow an audience—any audience—just throwing anything up for the sake of consistency is a distraction.
2 — IMPACT / Would I feel good about it being seen, saved, shared by millions of people?
Whether you want it or not, social media content can achieve dizzying degrees of virality, potentially reaching way more people than you had anticipated. This question gets at whether you’re really okay with your creation being seen by the general public—considering everything from the integrity of viewpoints shared to personal details that could threaten privacy.
3 — AUTHENTICITY / Can I see myself keep making this kind of thing of my own volition?
A lot of social media advice will tell you to throw spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks, and do more of that. Which makes sense if your only goal is to reach as many people as possible, rinse, repeat. But what for? If you find out that a particular topic/format “works well”, it will inevitably be tempting to keep doing it even if the content itself no longer aligns with your purpose. That gangbusters kind of content might be what your audience comes to expect, making it harder to change course or stop altogether.
Many will say to not “overthink” it—just make something and see what happens. I think that makes sense in the beginning when you’re just testing out a platform. But anything that can capture our attention for hours a day calls for a process of constant checking in—for creators and consumers alike. What is my relationship with this platform? What do I want out of it and what does it want out of me?
Not long after I first wrote down the thoughts above, I decided to stop making ReelToks. Mostly because I realized the incentives and atmosphere of short-form video don’t support the long-term vision for my current projects. Let me tell you, it was a very freeing decision.
Nowadays, I spend my spare time writing newsletter-blogs on Substack, which generally vibes better with how I want to create. But the reason I wanted to bring all this up is because I’ve been finding it helpful—even necessary—to come back to those three questions.
Last fall, I wrote a post on Ode about curbing clothes shopping, and it went as close to viral as I've ever gotten on Substack. That resonating piece, plus the fact that simply way more people were joining Substack, started a wave that helped Ode grow much faster in the last few months than it ever had since I started it three years ago. After the initial spike, I started second guessing what I was publishing more than ever before.
So I’ve been having to sit on things that didn’t feel quite right yet. Scrap some stuff in progress even though I hadn’t posted for a while. Go back to the questions above. Pause, interrogate, and try to figure out what would be the most interesting, well-executed version of the thing I really wanted to express. Slow, deliberate, sustainable.