Polylane for a content creator

Publishing a video means shooting it, editing it, making the thumbnail, posting about it, and mentioning it in the newsletter. That is five pieces of work. Three of them are YouTube work, one goes to Instagram, and one goes out by email.

A flat to-do list keeps those five as unrelated lines. So when the shoot moves to Thursday, nothing tells you the newsletter mention is now wrong, and you find out on send day. Polylane treats the video as one piece of work that happens to touch several channels.

Projects run down one axis and channels run across the other. Your series is a row. YouTube, Instagram, and Newsletter are columns. Every cell holds the tasks for that project on that channel.

Shoot, edit, and thumbnail sit together in the cell where the series meets YouTube. The community post sits in the Instagram cell. The mention sits in the Newsletter cell. Read the row left to right and you have the whole video, including the parts nobody counts as work until they are late.

YouTube and Instagram are default channels, alongside Facebook, Pinterest, and Website. Newsletter is one you add. Free gives you two custom channels, which covers a newsletter and one more; Solo lifts the cap.

Select the tasks that belong to the same video and link them. A linked batch carries one colour in the grid, so the cells that make up a single video read as a set rather than as five coincidences.

Drag any member of a batch onto a day and Polylane schedules the whole batch, not only the task you dragged. Before it lands, the schedule dialog lets you give each task its own length — a 30-minute thumbnail, a 15-minute community post — and choose how they sit on the day:

• Same hour — every task in the batch stacks in one slot, for work you will do in one sitting.
• Back-to-back — each task starts where the previous one ends, and the dialog shows you what time the run finishes.

Back-to-back is the honest one. Thumbnail, post, and newsletter mention laid end to end is a number of hours, and the calendar shows that number before you promise the upload date.

Drag one scheduled block to another day and Polylane asks whether to move all the linked tasks with it. Confirm and the whole batch lands on the new day with the spacing between blocks intact, so the edit still sits after the shoot. One drag, one confirmation, no hunting for the pieces you forgot.

A batch lands on one day, which is the real constraint to plan around. Link the pieces that share a day — thumbnail, community post, and newsletter mention on publish day — and give the shoot and the edit their own days. Anything you have not scheduled stays in the grid, so the rest of the video is still in front of you while the calendar holds only what you actually committed to.

Most creators are also doing something else: client work, a course, a second channel in a different language, a shop. Each one becomes its own project row, sharing the same channels and the same calendar. Two uploads and a client deadline in the same week collide in one place instead of in three tools.

For work on a cadence — a weekly newsletter, a Friday upload — set a daily, weekly, or monthly rule with a start and end date. Polylane works out the occurrences and shows them in the grid, and you drag each one onto the day you intend to do it. Cycles you skipped show as a count on the task, so a newsletter you have missed twice looks different from one you sent yesterday.

Overview is the working grid: every project against every channel, for planning the week. Flow takes one project at a time and lays it out channel, then tasks, then links, which is what you want when you are inside a single video. Graph draws the same data as a connection map, so you can see which tasks are attached to which. Graph is still rolling out and may not be switched on for your account yet.

Free gives you 2 projects, the default channels plus 2 of your own, calendar scheduling, and task linking. One channel and one other pursuit fits. It runs on the device you are using, with no cloud sync and no calendar export, which is enough to find out whether the grid matches how you actually publish.

Solo removes the caps: unlimited projects and channels, cloud sync across devices, and .ics export so the schedule reaches the calendar you already live in. It is $19/mo or $180/yr (₹499/mo incl. GST), and every new account starts with a 14-day trial. A founding rate may be open — the pricing page shows the current one.

Stopping does not cost you what you made. Projects past the Free limit stay visible and turn read-only, and they unlock again if you resubscribe.

Worth knowing before you move a production schedule into it.

• Google Calendar sync is push only, from Polylane to Google. Events you create in Google do not come back, and two-way sync is not shipped.
• There is no mobile app, so scheduling happens at a desk rather than on set.
• There are no integrations and no importer. Nothing reads your uploads, your editor, or your existing board — you type the tasks in.
• There are no AI features. Nothing drafts titles, guesses durations, or fills your week for you.
• Studio, the shared workspace for up to 5 seats at $39/mo, is a founding waitlist rather than a plan you can buy. If you want to hand a board to an editor or a VA, that does not work today.

If one of those is the deciding factor, this is the wrong tool for you this quarter, and we would rather say so than take the first month.

Put one series in, link the five pieces of the next upload, and schedule the week around them. An hour tells you whether the grid matches how you work. Start free and your first board opens with a creator layout — a project, its channels, and a task already on today's calendar — instead of an empty grid. No credit card required.

Paid plans carry a 14-day money-back guarantee and you can cancel any time. If your publishing workflow needs something that is not here, email support@smatsols.com and a person who works on Polylane answers.