I never remember to send my newsletter, so BlackOps sends it now

My last newsletter went out August 19. Since then I published six posts and none of them went to the list, because sending the newsletter is the one step I never remember to do.

So I built Newsletter Autopilot into BlackOps today. I set a schedule. If I don't send by the deadline, BlackOps writes the issue and sends it for me.

It says it's BlackOps

I didn't want it pretending to be me. Every autopilot issue opens with BlackOps saying I couldn't get to the newsletter this time, so it's covering. If my posts show why, like I've been shipping a lot or I said I was traveling, it can say that. Otherwise it just says I couldn't get to it.

Then it walks through every post I published since the last issue, a couple of sentences on each and a link, plus my five most engaged posts on X from the same stretch. It reads my last five issues so it matches how they're put together and doesn't repeat anything I already sent.

How the schedule works

Mine is every two weeks, Sunday at 10pm. The clock counts from my last send, so if I send one myself, autopilot backs off and the next deadline moves out two weeks from that.

A day before the deadline it emails me a heads-up that nothing has gone out and it's going to send one. It won't send without that heads-up. If I published nothing new it sends nothing and tells me so.

What I fixed before turning it on

I had it send me a preview of what it would write right now. Two problems. A tweet from 2014 showed up as "recent" because it had been imported and stored with the import date. It reads the real date from the tweet itself now. And the first draft mentioned my vault, which is not something that goes in a newsletter. It only sees what I've published now, nothing private.

The first real one goes out tonight at 10pm, unless I beat it.

If you're on the list, now you know why the next issue sounds a little different.