Email course outline generator

The arc this generator uses, and why it is that shape

Day one is the smallest thing a reader can do today that produces a result they can see. Not an introduction, not a history of the subject, not a promise about the days to come: something done, and finished, within the time they have between opening the email and going to work. This is the day that decides everything else, because a reader who did something on day one opens day two, and a reader who read a welcome message about what is coming has no reason to.

The middle days carry one idea each. One, not three. The constraint is not about attention spans; it is that a reader can act on one idea between two mornings and cannot act on three, and a course whose emails are not acted on is a newsletter that happens to arrive in order. An idea that will not fit in a single email is usually two ideas that have not been separated yet, which is a useful thing to discover while outlining rather than while writing day four.

The second-to-last day is the mistake. By this point a reader has enough of the picture to recognise themselves in it, which is the only moment when "here is where this usually goes wrong" is useful rather than discouraging — put it on day one and it is a warning about something they have not done yet. It is also, reliably, the most forwarded email in a course, because a named mistake is the most quotable thing a teacher produces.

The last day recaps and names one next step. The recap exists because a reader finishing five or ten mornings has no overview of what they covered, and the summary is the thing they keep. The single next step exists because a course that ends with three suggestions ends with none taken. One step, stated plainly, and then the course is over — which is a feature, and the reason people finish these and do not finish newsletters.

Why this is rules and not a language model

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The generator is a pure function in the page: the same four answers produce the same outline every time, on any day, with no account, no key and no network request. You can read the rules in the repository and you can use the tool with your connection switched off.

That is a deliberate trade and it is worth being honest about which way it cuts. A language model would write you more specific-sounding days, and it would invent them. The middle days of a course are the part only you can fill, because they depend on what you actually know about the subject and what your particular readers already understand — and a plausible invented outline is worse than an obviously structural one, because it reads as finished and has to be checked line by line before it can be trusted.

So this tool does the part that is genuinely mechanical. The arc is the same for every subject, the day numbering and the subject-line prefixes are arithmetic, and the beats under each day are the questions a teacher has to answer for that day whatever they teach. What comes out is a scaffold with your words in the right slots and your thinking still to do.

What comes out, and what you still have to write

Each day arrives with a working title, a suggested subject line carrying the "Day N of M:" prefix, one sentence on what that day is for, and three beats — the concrete things that email has to contain for the day to do its job. The beats are phrased as instructions rather than copy, because the copy is the part that has to be yours.

The suggested subject lines are starting points, and a starting point in a course email has a particular advantage: it does not have to sell anything. A reader confirmed their address for this and the sequence is the reason the message is in their inbox, so a subject line here can afford to be a plain description of the day rather than a hook. "Day 3 of 5: the mistake everyone makes with sourdough" is a better course subject line than anything clever, and the prefix is doing useful work.

Copy the outline out as plain text and write in it. The most common way this goes wrong is writing day one last, after the shape of the course has settled, and discovering that the smallest win no longer fits — write day one first, send it to yourself, and check that somebody could actually do it before breakfast.

Choosing a length between five and ten days

Five days is the default for a reason: it is one working week, it is short enough that a stranger will agree to it, and it is long enough to carry a first win, two ideas, a mistake and a recap, which is a complete piece of teaching. Every day you add is another morning of a stranger's attention you have to justify, and the drop-off between day one and the last day grows with the number of days, not with the quality of the writing.

Go to seven or ten when the subject genuinely has that many separable ideas and each one needs acting on before the next makes sense — a skill built in sequence rather than a topic explained. What should not decide the length is how much you know. A ten-day course written because there was a lot to say is the most common way a good five-day course gets diluted, and the reader who unsubscribes on day six is not telling you the subject was too small.