223: Stepping up Systems—How I Shifted to Daily Podcasting

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. Today I am peeling back the curtain on what I've learned from shifting or pivoting from a weekly podcast to a daily podcast. This is going to be most interesting for those of you who either have a podcast already or are contemplating starting one. Or you just like to geek out with me about systems and software and your own creative process. In which case maybe you'll be able to replace the word podcast podcast with your own project. Whether it's writing, journaling, I don't know. I'll leave that up to you. The categories I'm going to cover are mindset, Motivation, Systems, skills, and software. It occurs to me that for any creative project, these categories would hold mindset, motivation, systems, skills, and software. Before we dive in by popular demand, I am going to also do a longer, more in depth version of this in a Heart of Podcasting masterclass that's going to be on June 25th. It's not free, but I think you'll find that it's worth the value if you're somebody that really likes to watch see walkthroughs, have Q and A, have that whole full deep dive immersion experience. I'm setting aside three hours and we're doing this almost as a podcast setup. Sprint. We have the week long course recordings already available@pivotmethod.com heart certainly, if you want to buy the week long course that I did a few years ago, you can. This masterclass is going to be more in depth live walkthroughs. I'll show you my systems, how I prep for interviews, the software. I might even show you the quickest editing tips that I've learned in GarageBand. If you want to join for that, go to pivotmethod.com heart and you'll see a workshop registration link at the top of the page. I was inspired to do this episode by watching a YouTube video of how our podcast came to be by Nick and Jack of Robinhood. Snacks they have a podcast called Snacks Daily where they choose three business tech stories of the day and break them down in a really fun, punchy, engaging style. I loved seeing their walkthroughs of their Google Doc, how they prepare, how intense it is to put out a daily show. I'll put that link in the show notes and I encourage you to check out Snacks Daily as well.

For starters, on the Mindset piece, whether you're going to do a daily, a weekly, or a monthly podcast or creative project, there is a commitment involved. It's much easier to commit to a certain frequency than to waffle constantly about Should I do a new one today? Should I do a new one this week? Do I feel like putting a podcast out? Do I feel like writing a newsletter this week? Better is to make a commitment with the Pivotless newsletter I published that week weekly and I sometimes say on my website weekly ish because I have been known to miss one every now and then. I encourage you, if you're not already joined, if you're not already receiving Pivot List every Thursday, go to pivotmethod.com pivotlist I've been sending a newsletter since 2010, so this is a newsletter 10 years in to curating the best of what I find around the web.

What's been interesting about shifting from a weekly to a daily podcast is what I call 7X thinking. Of course, I'm adapting that from a common principle called 10x thinking, which Jim Collins popularized in Good to Great. And then Grant Cardone, with his big old personality, wrote a book called 10X. How can you take whatever systems and questions that you currently have for a creative project and then double it, quadruple it, 10x it? What does that look like? How would it change how you approach the project? So it's been really interesting that I used to struggle to put out one episode a week. I thought that was overwhelming. I thought that was a lot of work. I thought that was taxing on my business and then now shifting to daily. It's like it just completely shifted my perspective. And it also helped us pare down our systems and streamline. I'll share more about that in a minute. To understand what are the bare essentials and how do we 8020 this? How do we take the 20% of the tasks and the must do activities that yield 80% of the results or even 80% perfect. Dan Sullivan wrote a book called the 80% Approach or the 80% Solution. I always forget, but that's all about can you just get that 80% good enough version out? And don't worry about refining the 20% all the way. I've talked about this many times on the podcast. In order to do anything at all, especially ongoing public original thinking, you have got to release perfectionism. If you think a show has to be perfect, you'll never put it out. Part of the mindset of daily podcasting is understanding how much of every episode and every day is going to be imperfect, both in terms of what I say, how I say it, even how the final edited audio sounds. Even sometimes we forget to put a link in the show notes or a link is broken or a shortcut doesn't work. We use redirects. So pivotmethod.com 220 that would redirect to the actual URL of a post. Sometimes those are off. Stuff happens when you're moving quickly. There's the now much derided saying move fast and break things that gets now torn to shred as like why Silicon Valley often has no qualms about how they affect society. But nonetheless, the good part of move fast and break things is if you're moving fast and if you are emphasizing shipping, as Seth Godin would say, or production and public hitting the publish button, you're gonna break some things. Ideally, you're just breaking small things. No one thing is that big of a deal, and you can refine over time. The second major category of any creative project, especially podcasting, is motivation. What is motivating you to start this in the first place? What will motivate you to keep going even when you hit a dip or you get tired or you think you want to stop? And what will motivate you to take the risks to put new types of content or interview your heroes or do a solo episode? If you're not used to doing something like that, what is the motivation that is driving this project? That is the magnet pulling you forward? For me, what's motivating a daily conversation is for one, pivot is all about navigating changes. So when the pandemic hit, I realized we're all going to be navigating 10x20x100x the amount of change and uncertainty and insecurity and anxiety and job changes. We are pivoting constantly now. So how could I not jump on the mic every day. Part of my motivation is to be a source of calm presence and bring you real time conversation and examples. Even if I don't have any answers, let alone all the answers, that this can be a touchstone for you. So there's something for me that's motivating about a daily show because I know what the daily shows I listen to bring to me. I know how they serve as a comfort to me. I also know how podcasts that I like that publish some of them twice a week. I look forward to them. I think to myself, is it Tuesday yet? Is it Friday yet? Is it the day that my favorite show comes out? If I can be that for any of you, that's really exciting. Part of my motivation is refining our systems. We don't have time to waste on many small steps that don't make an impact. So I knew that going from weekly to daily would really help us refine our systems and get even faster and tighter at how we produce the podcast. Another motivating factor for me is your feedback. Many of you have written and filled out the listener survey and said this is helping. Thank you for doing this. During this time I only need to get a couple of those and then that's what motivates me to keep going.

This is where we now shift into systems. The nitty gritty. Here's how I build the podcast in general. I'm going to share this with the daily cadence, but you can adapt it to whatever cadence you're going to be doing. The first thing I'll do it involves brainstorming. Part of this is putting up my antenna. What's needed next? In a recent conversation with Mitch Joel, he said that podcasting, both choosing guests and sequencing the order that episodes come out is like being a dj. And I definitely feel that way. It's as if as a podcaster, you're a DJ for a conversation that is happening in your community that you are leading. So I'll brainstorm what kind of solo episode could I bring today or this week and or what guests are on my radar? What guests are interesting? What topics am I curious about, or am I struggling with that? I think I would be really valuable to bring that person on. So no matter what, one way or another, it's listening deeply, putting those antenna out and brainstorming what's needed today, what's needed this week. If there's a guest, I schedule the guest and then prepare. So I have a calendly scheduling link that once a guest chooses a time Brenna we use a tool called Zapier to automatically create a task in Asana that gets automatically assigned to Brenna on my team, Brenna will then prep an Evernote note using a podcast prep template that we've created. She'll put things like the guest's bio, book titles, links, and recent tweets or social media. Then I'll spend time preparing for the guest. Often it means reading their book, digging deeper into their bio, really thinking deeply about what is my intention for this conversation and what are some kickoff questions. Knowing that I'll try to be in the moment as much as I can.

During the interview or during the solo episode, I try to track loose topics and links or resources or Pivot podcasts mentioned. This helps us reduce the task of somebody else having to re listen to the entire episode just to do show notes. After recording. Whether a solo episode or an interview, we have a raw audio file that goes into a folder for the month. So for example, in our Dropbox we have a folder called Final Files. We have a folder called Raw Files. In Raw Files, there's a folder for each month. So in this case the month of May, the raw file from that solo episode or interview would go into the May folder. There's three types of audio edits that might happen. One is super basic. Let's say it's an interview and nothing weird happened. There weren't a lot of extra ums. There was no big interruption that would be distracting for listeners. In that case, we can just clip any extra silence at the beginning, and we can clip any extra silence at the end. And that file wouldn't even need to go to an audio editor. We could upload it directly to Ophonic, a system or online tool basically, that levels some of the audio. Not in the most professional way, but it does a few little things that I don't even know the extent of. And it also importantly appends the intro and the outro to the podcast, as well as publishes that final file in the album art, publishes the final file to Libsyn, Dropbox, and Soundcloud. Libsyn is where we host the audio files, because if Oprah linked to the Pivot podcast someday, and it was only hosted on Squarespace, there's a potential that my site could crash because I'm probably not on a big enough shard or server storage within Squarespace to hold that kind of traffic. So it's generally safer for anything that's going to be getting a lot of pings and downloads, and audio files can Be kind of large. The company, like Libsyn, specializes in that sort of external hosting of the files. The second type of audio editing would be simple edits. Maybe there's just a few weird things that happened. It's not going to be as clean as chopping off the beginning and the end of the audio file and calling it a day. In that case, I often will send it to an audio editor. We work with a wonderful guy named James Beheard Media in the uk. Thank you Petra for the connection. James. If I give him timestamps, he will level out the audio between me and the guest and he'll make a few cuts where indicated. James does not listen back and do a full deep line edit. That's the third type of edit. So let's say there's something really distracting that kept happening or the episode is just not tight enough. Often solo episodes require more line editing than a conversation with a guest. Conversation with a guest kind of flows and it's meant to be natural and in the moment, as if you're there sitting there having coffee with us. A solo episode involves often a lot more fits and starts. Maybe I'm taking too many breaths. Maybe I need to adjust my audio levels. Maybe the dog started barking or I lost my train of thought, or I needed to pause and collect myself, or I needed to stop and take a sip of water so a line edit would happen where? And I've been doing more of these lately with daily production. I just sit there kind of multitasking, doing show notes at the same time as I play the episode back and go cut out all the weirdness. Or we could send it to a partner that James works with and we say this episode has a lot of filler words in it. Please do an in depth line edit and clean it up again. That's not my normal default, but it happens every now and then during this daily podcasting. I've been doing a lot of the audio editing myself. It's weirdly calming. It does take a lot of time though. So let's say it's a 20 minute solo episode that might take 30 to 40 minutes. Because when listening back, you're stopping and removing something trying to get the audio to line up so it doesn't sound distracting. And that's never perfect either. I use GarageBand for this. There's also software called Audacity that a lot of people use. Both are free if you have a Mac. I'm sorry, I don't know what if you have a PC, what you would use? You don't need intense audio editing skills to do a basic rudimentary editing job. You really just need to listen back, watch the file as it progresses, and know when you want to cut. I use control T for trim, where you want to make a cut, where you want to remove some stuff, and then you have to just move these rectangles around until the whole sequence makes sense. Now, an audio engineer listening to this is probably shaking his head or her head and just saying, tsk, tsk, tsk. You have no idea what it takes to actually produce great sound. And they would be correct if you have the budget. And of course, for so many of the more professional shows, especially daily podcasts often have a whole team of producers, somebody listening while it's being recorded, coaching, making sure the audio inputs are correct in the first place, doing the post production, doing the edits, ad insertions, promos. There's all kinds of stuff that a whole team of audio people would be doing. I am approximating as much of that as I can to again get you the 8020 in terms of the edited file. Once the audio is uploaded to Libsyn, Brenna will go in and set up a squarespace draft. We have a template for podcast show notes, so she'll copy the template, go in, add topics covered, the guest's bio, add the audio file from Libsyn, embed the SoundCloud player, find any links that are missing that we don't have, put the categories, change the short link. That's the short URL. Pivotmethod.com podcast pandemic, let's say. And then she'll mark it for review so that when I come in, then I do a final review, clean anything up, write the intro. I'm usually the one almost always, always writing the intro, and then I'll schedule it after it's scheduled. When I do my weekly Pivot List newsletter that goes out on Thursdays, I will either copy and paste the intro from if it's a weekly show, that week's episode into the Pivot List newsletter, or now I just say recent episodes include. So you may not know. You can go to pivotmethod.com podcastarchive and that has every episode that's ever happened on one page. I use that all the time just to see what episode number something was. Because with all the episodes listed on one handy page, again, that's pivotmethod.com podcastarchive one word. I can easily search for a name of a prior guest or a topic. Even if you do control f and you search for the word perfectionism, you're going to find all the podcasts that have that in the title. The second to last category is skills. You can imagine even as you're listening, there are a lot of skills involved and there are a lot of skills that one would develop over time doing something like this. There is the skill of listening. What is out there? What do people need? What can I offer that's different? I was reflecting during the pandemic that in the early days of the pandemic, it was almost easier to figure out what to talk about because not as many of the larger, less agile platforms had caught up yet. Now it's very different. It's harder to differentiate. There's more noise and that's true for any topic and any growing platform is that over time there becomes more noise and the bar does raise. It's harder to stand out, it's harder to be unique. So that's something that it's a skill that you constantly develop over time. Planning is a skill. What's the flow of content that DJing approach? Batching is a skill. So how can you know the days that we can post process four episodes at once or send four episodes at a time to James for audio editing and then Brenna can do four squarespace setup show notes at once. Those are amazing. And then it's the best feeling in the world to have five episodes pre scheduled out. That's when I get a chance to exhale and I'll say, ah, okay. I know that I don't have to go in and edit a podcast today because I've given a gift to my future self. I scheduled out five in advance and that's a good feeling. It's not that it's a problem to go in and say okay, but ideally, if you're doing a daily podcast, it doesn't mean that you have to dedicate all day, every day to doing it, unless it's your full time job. So again, like Nick and Jack at Snacks Daily, this is their job and I love what they do. They spend all day on it. So it depends what your resources are. But if you're someone where this is just one part of your pivot portfolio, the more you can batch, the better. Keeping in mind that if you batch too far out, sometimes things can get stale. Communicating, that's another major skill. Communicating with your guests, how you invite people, communicating with your team. For example, I've said to Brenna, I don't want to send you into a scramble with this daily cadence. I know that I've really stepped things up. How much time realistically do you need to set up show notes from the time I send you an audio file or assign something to you in a sauna? And she said, you know, two days out is helpful. So whenever I can, I try to give BRENNA at least 48 hours notice that an episode is ready for her. And if it's not, if I'm going to record and try to publish same day, I don't send her into a fire drill. I just do it myself. Some managers or entrepreneurs might disagree with me. They might think, well, you should never be the one finding links on the web. That's not a good use of your time. But I also don't believe in sending somebody else scrambling just because I didn't plan ahead that I wanted to record an episode that day and release it within the next hour. Why am I going to ask her? I don't even know what she's working on in that hour. I'm not going to ask her to drop everything just because I didn't plan ahead. Audio editing There are certain technical skills that I've already covered. Even things like learning how to adjust What I've in GarageBand is called automation Show Automation is how you can toggle volume levels if you have spikes and you want to lower the volume or you need to raise a guest's volume or a little sound clip or mix in a sound clip. There's. I did not know that before I started podcasting. That's just something that I've learned over time. How do I learn it? Googling it. I just fumble around by googling various questions that I have and find my way there. And I have made progress in these last five years. That brings me to our fifth and final category, software. You've heard me mention a lot of different apps and software in this conversation, but let me recap for you. The piece of software and services that we find most crucial. Evernote is where we keep all interview prep. It's really handy. We have a note for each interview. We have a template note that kicks off the format for what an interview Evernote note will look like. And that includes what episode will this be, what day will it publish. Similarly, in Asana we have one asana task for every episode. It includes the episode number when it will publish. And we have that project in asana board style so that the episode actually moves horizontally across the screen and as it progresses down the production path. I like recording on Skype with call recorder not Zoom because I have noticed that the audio quality is better. Although these days if you ask someone to log into Skype, they're like, huh, what's that? Everybody's so used to using Zoom. But I have found in my experience the audio quality is better if I'm recording a solo episode like this one that happens in GarageBand show notes and the podcast feed happens in Squarespace, but the audio itself is hosted on Libsyn L I B S Y N. When we do audio post processing without hiring James without an audio editor, we use Auphonic. That's spelled A U P H O N I C. There you have it folks. That is how we've pivoted the podcast to daily and the synthesized version of of all the systems. To recap the mindset, motivation systems, skills and software that we use to run this lean, mean podcast machine, you can tell for a daily show if you look at the team that produces New York Times Daily. I swear it's at least 20 people. So we're trying to figure out how we can be the most efficient with our systems and still rise to this challenge of a daily podcast for as long as it may last. I keep saying that because it's not likely that I could continue daily indefinitely, although I wouldn't count it out. But if I start traveling again for work or other life complications, it is it is an intense pace to keep up with. For some of the links mentioned. Of course, you can always find the show notes for this@pivotmethod.com podcast and again, if you want to see the full entire archive of the Pivot podcast all on one page, that's@pivotmethod.com podcastarchive. If you enjoyed this episode and you want to join For a live 3 hour masterclass with me, register@pivotmethod.com heart I will take all your questions. I will walk you through. I'll do screen sharing and go deeper into any one of these topics to help you improve your show, Pivot your show or launch a new one. Can't wait to see you there. If you're interested in joining, just go to pivotmethod.com heart thanks for listening everybody and have a beautiful rest of your day.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot Lists, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools. I'm geeking out on sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

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