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Posting Frequency Planner

Social Media
A workload budget, not cadence advice
This tool has no data on how often you should post, and will never suggest a frequency. Every posts-per-week figure here is one you entered; all it reports is whether that plan fits the hours you have.

What you make

Starting estimate — replace with your own timings. These are placeholders, not researched averages.

Format 1
Format 2
Planning, analytics, anything that does not scale with post count.

Hours you actually have

Total capacity: 6.0 h per week.

Backlog and cost (optional)

Finished posts sitting in the queue. Used for the runway chart.

Does it fit?

The plan needs more hours than you have
11.0 h of work per week against 6.0 h available — over by 5.0 h (183% of capacity).
Short-form videoCarouselcapacity 6.0 h

Short-form video · 5.0 h

Carousel · 5.0 h

Fixed overhead · 1.0 h

Required per week

11.0 h

Capacity per week

6.0 h

Utilisation

183%

Posts per week

6.0

Posts per year

312

Hours per year

572.0

Minutes per published post

100.0

Slack per week

-5.0 h

Annual figures treat a year as a flat 52 weeks and a month as 52/12 ≈ 4.333 weeks. No calendar dates are involved anywhere in this tool.

Three ways to close the gap

Cut posts: publish 3 fewer posts a week, at this plan's average of 100 minutes each.

Add hours: find 5.0 more hours a week of capacity.

Get faster: average 50 minutes per post instead of 100.

Next step, when you want dates
Turn this cadence into dated slots with the Social Media Content Calendar Generator.

What would fit, if you scale every format equally

One option among several — scaling everything by the same factor (55%) is rarely what anyone actually does, so compare it against the three levers above.

FormatPlanned originals/weekWould fit
Short-form video3.01.6
Carousel3.01.6

What that rhythm looks like

Short-form video

Every 2 days

Carousel

Every 2 days

Days from an arbitrary start, not calendar dates. Dashed lines mark weeks.

Where the time goes

FormatChannelPosts/weekIntervalMinutes/weekShare of loadMinutes/postPosts/year
Short-form video—3.0Every 2 days30045%100156
Carousel—3.0Every 2 days30045%100156

Sorted by weekly minutes, heaviest first. Share of load counts the fixed overhead in the denominator, so the format shares do not add up to 100%.

Which lever frees the most time

Minutes freed per week by publishing one fewer original of each format, including its derivatives and their engagement time.

Short-form video

1.7 h / week

Carousel

1.7 h / week

About This Tool

Posting Frequency Planner – Does Your Cadence Fit Your Hours?

Most posting schedules fail for an unglamorous reason: the arithmetic was never done. Three short videos, two carousels and a newsletter a week sounds reasonable until you multiply it out, discover it is eleven hours of production, and remember you have six. This posting frequency planner does that multiplication. It turns a content plan into minutes per week, sets that against the hours your team actually has, and tells you whether the two numbers are compatible.

It will not tell you how often to post
There is no authoritative source for an optimal posting cadence — the published tables contradict one another and the platforms themselves say only to check your own analytics. Every posts-per-week figure here is one you typed. This is a workload budget, not advice about frequency.

How the weekly load is calculated

Each content format contributes three kinds of time. Originals are the things you make from scratch. Derivatives are what you cut from them — the vertical clip, the carousel pulled out of a long post, the cross-post to a second network — counted per original and priced separately, because repurposing is cheaper than creating but is never free. Engagement time is replying to comments, and it scales with everything you publish, derivatives included.

The per-format arithmetic is:

minutes = originals × minutesPerOriginal + derivatives × minutesPerDerivative + totalPosts × engagementMinutes

Add every format together, add your fixed weekly overhead — planning, analytics review, the things that cost the same whether you publish two posts or twenty — and you have the required minutes per week. Capacity is the sum of your contributors' hours. Divide one by the other and you have utilisation: 100% means exactly full, 123% means the plan needs a quarter more time than exists.

Reading the capacity bar

The stacked bar is the headline. Each segment is one format's weekly minutes, the last segment is your fixed overhead, and the vertical rule marks the hours available. Anything to the right of that rule is hatched, because a plan that overruns capacity should be visible before you read a single number. A plan running at several times capacity has its overflow truncated and labelled rather than drawn to scale, so one runaway format cannot squash the rest to nothing.

Three ways to close a gap

When the plan does not fit, scaling every format down by the same factor is the mathematically tidy answer and almost never the real one. So the tool also gives you the single-lever alternatives: how many posts to cut at the plan's current average cost per post, how many hours to add, and what average minutes-per-post you would need to hit for the existing cadence to fit. The sensitivity strip ranks your formats by how much time one fewer post a week would free, which is usually the fastest way to see which lever is worth pulling.

Backlog runway

A queue of finished posts hides an over-committed plan for a while. If your hours support six posts a week and you publish eight, the backlog absorbs two a week until it does not. The runway chart draws that decline and names the week it reaches zero, which is typically the week a schedule visibly falls apart. It assumes the deficit stays constant, so read it as the length of the runway at today's settings.

Weeks, not dates

This tool deliberately performs no date arithmetic. Everything is rates and durations: a year is a flat 52 weeks and a month 52/12 ≈ 4.333 weeks, so there are no time zones, no daylight-saving edge cases and no week-start convention to get wrong. The cadence ruler shows days from an arbitrary start, not weekdays. When you are ready to put posts on real dates, the Social Media Content Calendar Generator picks up exactly where this leaves off.

Getting useful numbers out of it

The defaults in a new row are placeholders, not benchmarks — nobody measured them and you should replace them. The most common estimating mistake is timing only the visible work: filming gets counted, while scripting, editing, thumbnails, captions and the twenty minutes lost to re-exporting do not. Time yourself on a couple of real pieces before trusting the output. Everything is saved in your browser, so you can come back and adjust as your real timings emerge, and the CSV and Markdown exports carry the whole per-format table plus a totals block into a spreadsheet or a planning doc.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Posting Frequency Planner free?

Yes, Posting Frequency Planner is totally free :)

Can I use the Posting Frequency Planner offline?

Yes, you can install the webapp as PWA.

Is it safe to use Posting Frequency Planner?

Yes, any data related to Posting Frequency Planner only stored in your browser (if storage required). You can simply clear browser cache to clear all the stored data. We do not store any data on server.

How does this posting frequency planner work?

You list the kinds of post you make, how many originals of each you want per week, and how long each one takes you — production, repurposed cuts and time spent replying to comments. The tool totals that into minutes of work per week, adds your fixed weekly overhead, and compares the result against the hours your contributors actually have. If the plan fits you see the spare capacity; if it does not you see the size of the gap and the three ways to close it — publish fewer posts, add hours, or get faster per post.

How often should I post?

This tool will not tell you, and that is deliberate. There is no authoritative source for an optimal posting frequency: the published tables contradict each other, nearly all of them are drawn from a single vendor's customer base, and the platforms themselves say only to check your own analytics. A cadence that suits a daily news account is absurd for a quarterly research newsletter. Every posts-per-week figure here is a number you typed, and the only thing the tool adds is arithmetic about whether that number fits your hours.

Why is a year 52 weeks and a month 4.333 weeks?

Because this tool does no date arithmetic at all — it works purely in rates and durations, so there are no calendar dates, time zones or daylight-saving transitions involved. A year is treated as a flat 52 weeks and a month as 52/12 ≈ 4.333 weeks. A real year is about 52.18 weeks, so an annual figure here runs roughly 0.3% low; that is far smaller than the error in your own time estimates. If you need posts placed on real dates, use the Social Media Content Calendar Generator instead.

What counts as a derivative?

A derivative is anything you make from an original rather than from scratch: a vertical cut of a long video, a carousel pulled out of a blog post, the same image cross-posted to a second network. You give a count per original and a separate, usually much smaller, minutes-per-derivative figure. Derivatives count as published posts, so they add engagement time too, which is why doubling your output by repurposing still costs more than nothing.

How is the backlog runway calculated?

It only applies when your plan is over capacity — you are publishing faster than you can produce. The tool works out how many posts a week your hours actually support, subtracts that from your planned posts to get a weekly deficit, and divides your banked pieces by it. The chart shows the queue draining to zero and names the week it runs dry. It assumes the deficit stays constant, so treat it as the length of the runway at today's settings, not a forecast.

Are the default minute estimates based on research?

No. The numbers in a new row are unverified placeholders, there so the form computes something on first load, and they are labelled as such in the tool. Replace them with your own timings — ideally measured rather than remembered, since most people underestimate editing and overestimate how long filming takes. The output is only as good as those inputs; the tool contributes the arithmetic, not the estimates.