130: Day in the Life of a Podcast Episode and How I Prepare for Guests

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based Business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello Hello Free Timers. Today's episode is taken from a loom that I did for the private BFF community. Somebody submitted a question asking about my podcasting process and specifically how I prepare for interviews with guests. This was originally created as a video walkthrough loom so you can get the link to that in the show notes. Compliments on me. But if you want more content like this, more behind the scenes of anything and everything you could ever think to ask about my business, I'm always happy to share. I I would love for you to join us in the BFF community. You'd be in great company with fellow heart based business owners. We're all focusing how to get out of the busy work so we can do more of our best work. How to free up time far into the future through smarter systems and building on this theme of content creation. How to keep up with our ongoing public original thinking. How to really establish ourselves, our businesses and our brands as thought leaders. Noodling on that as a big focus for us in 2023. As a special thank you, I have two goodies for you if you decide to sign up and join us this fall, you can go to itsfreetime.com BFF use promo code Podcast at checkout and you'll get a special discount. And for anybody who signs up as a result of listening to this episode, I will grant you complimentary access to the heart of Podcasting course. It's a week of material where I also dig more into how to really listen deeply, be present on interviews, ask powerful questions. All the skills that go even deeper than the systems that I'm sharing in this episode here on the podcast. So again, if you want to see the loom, just click on over to the show notes. It's right there. You can watch this on video But I've pared it down, cleaned it up a little bit and I want to share it out with you because I remember recently paying over a hundred dollars just so I could access a book bonus that was somebody walking through their precise PODC process. And I have to say I was a little disappointed I didn't learn anything new. So I figure I'm going to open source my process here. It's always changing and evolving, but maybe you will find a helpful nugget for whatever it is that you're creating, even if it's not a podcast. And if there's a podcaster in your life who you know and love, please send them this episode. I'm sure they have already their own systems, very refined, but we're all constantly learning from each other. So if there's a podcaster you love, please send them this show. You can go to Pod Link freetime to get a really easy sharing link that allows them to open this episode in whatever app they prefer to listen to podcasts in. With that, let's dive in.

Welcome to a day in the life of a Pivot or free time podcast interview. I got a great question from Travis about how I prepare for interviews and so I figured I would share everything I've developed and honed and refined in just about seven years of podcasting and now with two shows it's even more important to be organized. So let's start at the very beginning for those of you who have the free time operations dashboard, you know that I like to organize notion in terms of a business areas database and then within podcasts is everything we need to know to run this part of the business. So I won't go too much into dashboard related items. But suffice it to say that everything I need to know about my two shows is here Pivot, Free time and general podcasting input on the guest invite tracker. This is where I will put names down the left hand side and then with the help of the wonderful production team, I've signed up for the highest package they offer which is full service concierge. One of the team members will see who I suggest and for which show and then source their email address if they can find it contact page on the website and sometimes I fill in the book title and subtitle and then this is where I can track if I've actually invited somebody and what's the status? Am I sending it? Do we still need their contact info? Are we awaiting a response? I tend to interview a lot of authors, so pro tip here is On Amazon, you can actually search for new releases by putting in say three months from now or six months from now, searching for the format of hardcover and then books that are going to be published in that time window. What that allows you to do is see who is coming out with books in the next three, six, nine months and email their team right when they're most likely to say yes because they're trying to coordinate their own book and podcast tour. Once a guest says yes, we head on over to freetime podcast production. If they say yes, I send them my calendly link Calendly talks to Notion via zap. So there's a zapier zap that when somebody says yes. For example, let's look at the people part with Annie Hyman Pratt. This was a recommendation from Megan at Onestone Creative and a fellow bff. Once Annie says yes and either she or her team fills out the form, then the calendly invite that they include like their phone number, their email, do they have an external mic, their mailing address, what is the link to their bio? All of that gets automatically populated and the status goes from to invite or an idea of who to invite to automatically becomes Scheduling and Prep when it's here. In Scheduling and prep, if I can, I will look at the calendar and assign it an episode number. That means I'm being planful. I know exactly when this is going to come out. It obviously has to be far enough after the interview date for the pub date before the interview happens, someone on Onestone Creative will help with pre interview prep, so I've already started filling in this as well. What the team will usually do is put the official bio. It's often much longer than we need. And then they'll also fill in recent tweets or articles, TED talks, anything that I might want to know about since I'm not on social media. If someone can pull recent socials and put it here or articles LinkedIn posts, that's usually really helpful. And then they also fill in some of the bio stuff so that when I'm on Live with a guest I can read their bio right away. If Notion doesn't have any content in it in the actual body, you can use one of your templates. I have four different episode templates. A guest interview, a solo episode. Book club is a new format I might pilot and then a listener who submits their favorite time saving system. All of these are different, but let's say for this tour let's go with a guest. Once we select the guest template that's when a couple more things get populated. The guest template includes audio edit notes. That happens when I'm live during the interview. I can hear oh, her dog barked around minute 20 or mine did anything like that. Or I really fumbled the introduction. Please fix that. So anything I can capture while we're interviewing. And then we have the main categories of the show notes populated and the production team will also help fill in some of the guest links. Now let's talk about how do I actually prepare for the interview? So, for example, Travis asked, am I reading their books in hardcover or Kindle or a galley? It depends. Lately I've been leaning more and more toward Kindle because it allows me to include a screenshot like this. You can see I was reading at 4 in the morning that day. Maybe I couldn't sleep. I can include images, so sometimes I'll put all the images behind a toggle. But with Kindle you don't even need to necessarily put screenshots because we're going to take a little side detour while I show you what's possible with Kindle. But sometimes Kindle's not available. So in the case of Richie Norton So before I show you what Kindle can do, they sent me a physical paper galley of his book because it's not out yet. As we can see from the notes, the book Release date is August 30th. That means that there is no Kindle edition, and the PDF doesn't have the magic of markup quite so much as what I like to do with Kindle. Although with a digital PDF, if you take a screenshot of the page, at least if you're on an Apple device, you can actually copy and paste text from the image itself. Sometimes, while I have the book in front of me, I'll come to my notion page and I'll do voice dictations. So I'll read aloud from the book. Maybe I'll say, ask yourself if the goal is more time, why not start with a process or project that creates time, not takes time? I'll just voice dictate that into this notion list of potential topics. I might voice dictate. Are you sharpening pencils or are you creating art? Or I'll take a screenshot of the physical book and copy and paste the text. I will often pull in an image of the table of contents as well.

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In terms of best practices for the pre interview prep, I'm just looking for little nuggets so I actually fill in topics covered in advance for the Pivot podcast. I used to in the show Notes have a whole bulleted list of 10 to 20 topics covered during the conversation. I've simplified show notes to not do that anymore, but this list still helps me prepare in the moment. And so sometimes I might be in the conversation with Richie and I'll say okay, we covered positive reinforcing constraint. Great. Okay. Now actually while he's talking, I might move this up and I'll say, okay, next up I want to ask are you sharpening pencils? Sometimes I'll even put a line return indicate that this is what I've already asked this person. And then down here, okay, what's next? Sometimes I get a paper galley and I know I want to have the guest on. Then their book comes out. For some reason they have to reschedule and so the book comes out. So what I did with Tiago Forte, that happened first I just had a paper galley. Then I actually bought the Kindle version and I transferred, I copied and pasted my highlights from the paper galley into the Kindle edition so that I could do this export. And this was the side detour that I want to show you. I have Readwise IO Readwise pulls in Kindle highlights and it emails me a couple random book highlights every day. It's amazing. You gotta check it out. But one of the coolest things is that Readwise also exports all your Kindle highlights to notion to something that I've renamed Library. I love supporting authors, so even if I have their hardcover book, if I'm preparing for the podcast, it's not that big of a deal to pay $10 and have easier prep for myself. So what I'll do is I will highlight the Kindle up, down and sideways. I make sure that my Kindle highlights are synced to Amazon, I make sure they're synced to Readwise, and I make sure Readwise has synced to Notion. Yes, it's a couple extra steps, but what it does is pull in every single highlight to this kind of a page. Everything, everything, everything. So then I can easily move blocks move it to Tiago Forte's interview page if I wanted. Now, I don't like to move stuff because I do still want my record of all of Tiago's brilliance here in one place, but I've created a relation in this Notion database to connect to the appropriate podcast episode. I will sometimes manually copy and paste, but at least I don't have to retype great quotes like this one. Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity. So good, right? With Richie Norton, where I only had the paper book, I have a Dropbox folder of all the images that I took so I could even scan through those right before our conversation. While we're talking. Sometimes the key takeaways just jump out and I go oh that's so good. And I will try to give the production team a head start by noting one of the takeaways during the conversation at the end. You know, for free time, I ask what permission they want to give every single time. So if I can do it without too much distraction, I mute on my end and I will type out a little bit of their permission slip. And while it's fresh, I'll come up with the DO or delegate this next if I can, or as soon as I hang up with this guest if it's jb on a good day, I will try to draft my few sentences of the intro because it's really a pain to try to get back in this whole mode. Like imagine I've been immersed in his book for weeks, but then a really heavy review and notes processing the day prior the morning of during the interview. So this is the easiest time to write the intro. It's never going to get any easier than right when I hang up after having done that deep immersion into this person's work. I use Riverside FM to record with Riverside fm. Do not create a new room for every guest. I have two rooms freetime and pivot every time I have a free time interview once we get in that same room with the same link. That way you can put it in the Calendly process and it's automatically added to their calendar. You don't have to send them a unique link. Anytime you start a new recording, it still creates a subfolder for that person. I also make sure that I have the guest's email here. Now that would happen automatically through Calendly, but I have to make sure if it's a one off because then someone from the production team will send this guest an email once the interview goes live. In terms of process, we see it move across the board. So as soon as I'm done recording with that person, I will move it into audio editing and I pull in the relevant team members. Because when it's just me recording, they don't really need to know about anything other than to help prep the show notes for the guest. Then on their side they'll move the card from audio editing to show notes because they now own the rest of the process. I don't own it and one of the main agreements that makes my heart sing is I said to the team, do not let me hold up any episode going live. This show must go on. Megan, the co founder of One Stone Creative said, we've only missed twice in five or six years. We pride ourselves on getting the episodes out every single week. And Freetime has two episodes a week so once I finish the interview I don't have to see it again. It's going to go live rain or shine. The question is whether I get my stuff together to actually review the show notes. They tend to draft in a Google Doc, so I'll review the show notes in a Google Doc that they send to me. I'd be just as happy to keep it in notion, but it works better for them. And then they have a Google Drive folder for all the finished assets in one place. So that's just as well. I love that it's in the cloud. Google Docs is so much easier for marking up text if I want to use the suggestion feature to really show what changes I'm making. So they'll send me the draft of the show notes in Google Docs. But even if I don't respond, they're meant to schedule and make that episode live. So if I don't like something in the show notes and I see the episode go live, we fix it after the fact. But I also don't approve the audio. They have a stellar audio editor and right now I know Megan also gives each episode a second listen so they have multiple pairs of ears on every episode. I would completely bottleneck the works I would slow it all down if I was re listening to the audio before it goes live. I will just listen to the audio once it's live at the same time with all of you. And then if there's a glitch, something that needs to be fixed, it's very rare. I'm not too picky about fixing small things after the fact. But if there's something like oh we forgot the show intro and outro, you know, I'll mention that and we'll re upload. It's no big deal. I feel like all of you, all of my listeners are pretty understanding Finalize scheduled to publish. We probably have too many categories, but sometimes every now and then we're waiting on one thing scheduled is just this actually went live and then Cher so if it's a guest like winning the week with Demir Share means that in this case Darla is going to email Demir and CC me and say your episode is live. Here's the pod link for sharing. Here's all the show notes and the episode art. We're pretty minimal because as you all know, I'm not really on social media, so I don't obsess about all the shareable assets, but I definitely like to ask for them to share the link if they can. Then the episode can move into the archive. If I want to go really bonkers, I can look at all data. That's everything that's ever been. It's going to be an overwhelming list, but sometimes I want to see or search the entire thing and that's it. So you can create all kinds of different views in notion. The focus of this is not so much about notion, it's just showing you how I prepare for interviews and how I move the life of a podcast episode forward or move it along. I can't help but share as well my made by Monday. So sometimes if I'm batching and you want to know about solo episodes, I do like to batch those. I book time at Gotham Production Studio here in New York and so I have a little view here for each show. That's a list view recording this month that are only solo episodes. Sometimes I will even favorite this page so that it shows up right at the top of my list. I know that my sidebar would really overwhelm a lot of you. When you get the Freetime Operations Dashboard, you get all of this, everything here that you see on the homepage. This is all built for you. All the templates are there, all the sub templates are there. And I like to favorite things that I'm using often. I actually have the full free time book manuscript here just so I can search and pull things. Maybe I want to excerpt something on a podcast episode or I'm tracking book reviews. If you haven't left yours yet I would be so grateful but I'm trying to get over the hump, you know and I want to make sure I say thank you so I'll add your name if I see that you added a review. I try to say thank you and just keep track here and wait till I record this episode for you on the Hot Arborist. There's gonna be an episode called Be a Day Maker when something is that joyful and funny in my life. The reason I have it favorited is that I'm going into the studio in two days and I wanna record this one. So right now it's not in the podcast production board because it's in my storyworthy and that's a book by Matthew Dix. He says you homework for life is to capture a five minute story every day. I hope you find this helpful. I know I've shared a lot. Sometimes I wonder if I have TMI because I don't want to ever overwhelm you. But I know that there are so many people I would love to know the exact precise process that they use. And again, this has been refined over many months and years. I hope you find it helpful. If you want to learn more about the Operations Dashboard and implement that, including things like these production trackers already done for you, you can always visit itsfreetime.com dashboard. Have a beautiful rest of your day and happy day in the life of content creation. Whatever you're doing.

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