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by doctorOb 2182 days ago
> The biggest thing to me was that I learned that motivation was something that could come after you force yourself to wake up early and just get started

I had a similar experience doing a podcast [1] with a group of 6 others, each putting out one episode per day. It felt like failing the group if anyone had to skip their day, as we came close to a year without a break. I'd spend hours researching and scripting my episodes while riding the bus, waiting for a friend at a bar, or just winding down before bed. It was peak creativity for me and I'm happy with how it all turned out.

But after a while we got burned out and decided to stop, with the idea that we'd keep making our own podcasts. But without that mutual duty to release daily, no one to date has actually put anything out. The deadline/responsibility was the only way to make it happen–at least for me.

[1] - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2018/8/5/8-5-1...

3 comments

Man, that's a gruelling release schedule, even if it's basically "once a week per person". Most podcasts don't do the weekly thing, and those that do, it's either their full-time job AND/OR have a whole team working on it... I suspect that you guys could have benefitted from cutting back on the rhythm and working more as a team on more episodes.
oh man, i bet podcasts are so much more work
It varied episode to episode. I'd usually end up putting 10-15 hours into research and writing but with some topics I couldn't tackle in 7 days, I'd have to slap a roman numeral after it and try to finish it next week. Or, come up with some sort of cop-out for the week entirely.

In one case [1] I ended up with a teaser + 3 parter that wasn't super congruent because research for part 3 sort of changed how I would have approached the script for the previous two.

[1] Killdozer Teaser - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/2/16/s2e4... I - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/2/24/s2e5... II - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/3/3/s2e61... III - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/3/10/s2e6...

It depends on how produced they are. Most of the ones I do are interviews of around 30 minutes. To be honest, most of the work is getting the interview scheduled and recorded. The prep doesn't take long, editing is maybe a couple hours, and posting with show notes maybe another hour.

In the case of the format the parent used, the work is in the research and writing the script.

Of course, once you get to podcasts with multiple segments, edited content from multiple guests, scripted narration, etc. that's a lot more work.

Not saying a weekly podcast isn't a number of hours work in any case, but it needn't be too bad once you have a system down if you keep it simple.

Holy shit, one per day? Flipping brutal!