Day 2 of building my next course in public

Discover the purpose and define the three parts

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

We are now at Day 2. In this day, I tackled Step #1 and Step #2 from my Atomic Course Blueprint.

The steps are:

#1 Begin With The End In Mind
#2 The Three-Part Solution
#3 The What, Why, How Framework
#4 Right Way Examples
#5 Common Errors
#6 Incremental Exercises

You can see all the steps (I called them Methods) in more detail on this Twitter thread here:

🟡 Rodney Daut 🚢 @roddaut

Rapid Course Design 101 Over the past six years, I've shortened my course creation time from 4 months to 3 weeks. Want to know a secret? I now use the same 6 methods every time. 🧵 👇 #ship30for30 #tweet100

Here's what I did as I worked through Step 1 and Step 2

Step #1 is to Begin With The End In Mind

That means considering the purpose of my course on organizing your digital life.

Here's the purpose statement I came up with:

The purpose of this online course is to make it easier to keep all of your projects straight by learning the PARA system for organizing digital information.  That way you can relax knowing there's a place for everything, and everything in its place.

With an initial purpose statement down, it's time to move to the next method.

Step #2 is the three-part solution

This involves listing a ton of ideas I could teach, then putting them into clumps, and finally choosing just three clumps to teach.

Those clumps become the three parts of the course.

After following that process, I was left with the following three topics with subtopics underneath

Part 1: Setup PARA

• Defining each element

• Sorting stuff into each box

Part 2: Using PARA daily

• Adding stuff

• Producing projects

Part 3: Maintaining PARA

• Weekly Review

• Monthly Review

As I consider this outline, I start to wonder if this will be too big for an atomic course.  I've gotten a lot of positive feedback after giving different people videos showing them how to setup PARA on their particular software.

The initial setup of PARA is itself quite a victory.

When I get to writing out Part one a bit later, I'll re-evaluate whether or not the other elements will be needed.

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Thank you for reading.

Do you have any questions about what I laid out above? If so, please email me back or leave a comment.

Tomorrow, I will do a more detailed outline of the course using the What, Why, How Framework, Right Way Examples and Common Errors.

See you then.