I removed myself from my email broadcast

Half-automation isn’t enough on tasks you don’t enjoy

If you keep saying you will send the email this week and still do not send it, the problem probably is not discipline. It is friction. And if the task is one you do not enjoy already, even a small amount of friction is enough to lose you.

I knew this about myself before I built any of it.

When I started building this brand, I went straight to looking for ways to automate the email side. I have been doing email marketing professionally for years. I am good at it. I still do not enjoy it. I knew the manual version would not survive contact with my actual week. So I never tried to live the manual workflow. I went hunting for the automated version from day one.

One thing I tried early was having Claude draft an email version of each blog post. The thinking was that the writing is the slowest part. If the AI shrinks a post into an email in 30 seconds, the workflow becomes “edit and paste” instead of “write the whole thing from scratch.”

It almost looked like an answer.

Then I traced the full path. Write the blog post. Hand it to Claude. Get a tight email version back. Tweak a sentence. Open ActiveCampaign. Paste it in. Format it. Pick the list. Set the schedule. Hit send.

The AI did the hard part. The writing was no longer the friction. But the workflow still ended with me sitting inside ActiveCampaign every week, in email mode, clicking through the same five steps.

That was the moment I realized the AI step was solving the wrong problem.

Where the friction actually lives

The AI-drafted-email approach would have shrunk the work. It would not have removed me from the work. I would still have been the one switching from “I just published a blog post” into “now I open ActiveCampaign and do all the email stuff.” Even a few minutes in email mode every week is enough to lose me on a task I do not enjoy.

The friction is not the writing. The friction is the entire human step that comes after.

If you have ever tried to make a task you do not enjoy easier with a tool or a template, you may have noticed the same thing. Making the task easier does not mean you will do it. Removing yourself from it does.

Zero clicks after publish, or no consistency

On any recurring task you do not enjoy, half-automation is not enough. You need zero clicks after the trigger event or you will not be consistent.

I would rather send a slightly worse email that fires automatically every time than a slightly better email that I send half the time. Consistency is the actual outcome. Not polish. Not perfection. Showing up week after week so people start to recognize the cadence and begin to trust the relationship.

If I can choose between sending a great email 30 percent of the time and sending an okay email 100 percent of the time, I pick the second one. Every time.

What I actually did

I pointed ActiveCampaign at my blog’s RSS feed.

RSS is an old web format that many blogs still generate automatically. My site puts one at /rss.xml. Every time I publish a new post, the feed updates with the new entry.

ActiveCampaign has an RSS-trigger campaign type. You point it at a feed. You set a schedule. When new items appear in the feed, ActiveCampaign builds an email from the post content and sends it to the list.

I publish the blog post. The email goes out. I do not touch ActiveCampaign.

The handoff is zero clicks on my end after the blog post is live. That was the goal. Consistency requires that the path from “I finished the work” to “the email is sent” has no human step in the middle.

Honest update: it is not perfect yet

This did not turn into a perfect system overnight. But it did keep the problem in the right category. There never was a discipline phase to recover from. The problem stayed a fix-it problem the whole way. I would rather solve that kind.

Some posts trigger the email send right on schedule. Others sit in the queue and never fire. I am still digging into whether the issue is ActiveCampaign’s polling behavior, my feed structure, publish timing, or some combination. There is a separate post coming about a specific bug I hit with the RSS block in ActiveCampaign that I have not fully solved.

When the automation misses, I have a system to inspect and fix. That is a much better situation than the version where the workflow depended on me clicking through every week.

What this means for your setup

You probably are not on the same setup as me. The RSS-to-email pattern still works on almost every common tool out there.

Many popular email tools, including Mailchimp, Kit (formerly ConvertKit), MailerLite, and ActiveCampaign, support some version of RSS-to-email automated blog broadcasts. You point them at your blog’s RSS feed, set a schedule, and emails fire automatically when new posts appear.

If your blog is on Substack, the email is the post. You publish once and the email goes out. The trigger is the publish itself.

If your blog is on Ghost, the platform has a built-in email feature that fires on publish.

If your blog is on a popular hosted platform that does not have native email, third-party tools that connect blog RSS feeds to email tools are mature. Most major email platforms accept an RSS feed.

The principle holds no matter the tool. Find the path where you do not touch anything after publishing. If your current path has a human step between “post is live” and “email goes out,” that is the friction point that will eventually cause you to skip.

Put This Into Practice

Run this prompt through Claude or ChatGPT to audit your own setup. Walk through the questions one at a time.

Run the prompt on the one recurring task you have been skipping most. The output should give you a specific change to make this week.

Free your discipline for what only you can do

For every recurring task you do not enjoy, look at the workflow. Find the human steps. Then ask whether you can remove yourself from the steps you dread the most.

The same pattern shows up beyond email. A few that are easy to spot:

• File backups that run on a schedule instead of requiring you to click.
• Site updates that go live automatically when you save instead of waiting for you to click publish.
• Recurring social posts that pull from your blog’s feed instead of being typed in by hand.

Discipline is finite. Spend it on the work that actually needs your judgment. The recurring tasks that do not need your judgment should run without you.

For recurring tasks you already know you avoid, do not just make them easier. Remove yourself from the part you keep skipping.

This is the same pattern that showed up when I published 15 blog posts before I set up email automation and when I collapsed the workflow into one source piece for three channels. Different surface. Same lesson: remove friction at the edges so the work in the middle keeps happening.

Look at your own workflow this week. Where is there a recurring task you keep skipping, where the only thing between “the work is done” and “the next step happens” is you?

That is the place to remove yourself.

~ Anthony