My day with Craft: Running a Podcast, Newsletter & Projects

Craft is being used as a single command center to plan, draft, and publish an Apple-centric podcast and newsletter—while keeping work and personal life neatly separated. The core setup centers on one living document called “content HQ,” where nested pages, lightweight databases (collections), and structured templates turn recurring publishing workflows into something consistent and fast.

Instead of treating notes as flat text, Craft lets content live in a hierarchy: subpages can sit inside a document, and those subpages can be organized into cards for a more visual workflow. Tom Anderson splits his overall life into separate “spaces” so work items stay out of sight at home and personal items stay hidden during work. Within “content HQ,” he relies on collections to function like a lightweight database for publishing planning. A “content planning” collection is organized by category—podcast, newsletter, and YouTube—and can be filtered by date and channel. Each item carries custom fields that store metadata such as recording and publish dates and guest information, enabling quick views like “what’s coming up next” for a specific channel.

The workflow becomes repeatable through templates. When creating a new podcast episode, he starts with a blank entry and then opens the episode page to fill in custom fields. To avoid rewriting the same structure each time, he inserts a “new podcast template” via slash commands (for example, typing “temp” to insert from template). That template includes a recording checklist—steps that help ensure nothing gets missed—plus sections for the episode title, description, transcript processing tasks, social media posts, and a posting schedule. Craft’s toggle elements let parts of the checklist be hidden or shown with one click, keeping the page readable while still preserving the full process.

Tasks have also been integrated into the same system. With Craft’s task feature, he can schedule items, set reminders, and choose repeating tasks. He previously used Things for to-dos, but now keeps tasks and notes together: clicking into a task opens a dedicated page where progress notes and related research accumulate over time, creating a history of what happened and what’s next.

Newsletter creation follows the same pattern: a “next send” entry opens a page with the same custom fields, then a newsletter template is inserted. The template supports a headline and main content area, plus a place to collect links over the days leading up to a biweekly send. When it’s time to finalize, he reviews the collected links, selects the best ones, completes the writing, and then moves the finished draft to his email platform.

Finally, Craft’s publishing feature is used for a separate guide for college students choosing a Mac for school. The guide is written in Craft, then published to the web with a share-and-publish flow that supports custom URLs and optional password protection. After publishing, Craft provides basic analytics on views, and the published page retains the document’s layout and formatting, including active links and an optional comment section. The result is a workflow that stays consistent across Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so ideas and drafts can be captured anywhere and pushed through to publication from one system.