A Stanford MBA student and TikToker with 120K followers shares the spreadsheet she uses to stay organized and productive

• Cherie Luo is a Stanford MBA candidate and creator with about 120,000 TikTok followers.
• Luo has been creating content for three years, while keeping a full-time job and studying.
• Here’s the spreadsheet she uses to stay organized, and some tools she uses for time management.

Creating content has always been a passion project for Cherie Luo.

In 2020, the 28-year-old began posting short-form videos on TikTok while working as a product manager at LinkedIn. She’s amassed approximately 120,000 TikTok followers and approximately 67,000 Instagram followers since then, with content that discusses tips for breaking into tech and gives sneak peeks into her life and career journey.

Luo is now an MBA candidate at Stanford, has an internship in Japan, a podcast and a newsletter, and has begun publishing long-form videos on YouTube in addition to TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts.

Luo’s goal with content over the last three years has been to help others while also learning the ins and outs of building a business on social media. She hasn’t monetized the content extensively, telling Insider that she only accepted about ten brand partnerships in 2022 and one in 2023.

“As I start this, I want to be the type of creator who can go through all the motions and each part of the process,” she explained. “In the sense that I’m doing everything, it feels very much like a startup or an entrepreneurial path.” I do my own makeup, lighting, engineering, video editing, and business analysis.”

Luo intends to expand strategically and monetize her content more after graduating from business school in 2024, and she may hire help if her company succeeds.

The spreadsheet Luo uses to manage her content schedule

Luo has been able to post consistently in part because her content documents her work and life, allowing her to shoot and record her daily tasks. Even so, she admits that staying consistent across all platforms can be difficult.

Luo uses a spreadsheet to track her content schedule to make this process easier.

“I’m someone who likes to stay very organized, and because of my background as a product manager, I am very comfortable using spreadsheets,” she explained. “I figured out my schedule and the best posting cadence.” It all starts with the question, “When do I want to release and launch my content?”

She chose Sunday to release her podcast and Wednesday to release her long-form YouTube vlogs. She then works backwards within each week to schedule the various tasks she needs to complete in order to meet the launch deadline.

A screenshot of the spreadsheet Luo uses to keep track of things.

Luo assigns a different color to each platform where she posts, and she also keeps track of the status of each post and whether or not it has been published. She monitors her progress on it on a daily basis.

“It motivates me because I can see what I did last week and what I have planned for this week,” she explained. “It tells me which platforms I’m posting on the most frequently and what topics I’m covering.”

The spreadsheet also helps Luo understand how much effort each piece of content requires, as well as whether she is meeting her goals. To assist her followers, she has created a free downloadable spreadsheet template.

Time management applications

Luo’s content strategy includes cutting clips from her long-form content and repurposing them as shorter videos on other platforms. In her spreadsheet, she labels this as “podcast promotion.”

She occasionally uses the AI tool Opus Clip to speed up this process, though the quality does not always meet her expectations.

“I have a very high bar for the quality of content that I put out,” she explained. “So I try Opus Clip to see if it produces anything I want to post.” If not, I’ll go in there and cut it myself.”

She also uses the AI-transcription tool Descript to edit her podcast and generate ideas for LinkedIn posts and newsletters.

“When I have an idea, it’s much easier for me to explain it than it is for me to write it down,” she explained. “So I record a video on my phone, upload it to Descript, make a transcript of it, and then use that transcript to create written posts.” I’ll even post a summary on ChatGPT.”

According to her, the “schedule” feature on various platforms has been helpful in ensuring consistency with publishing, especially while she is doing her internship and traveling in Japan and may not have time to actively post content every day.