230: What’s Your Ratio of Quantity to Quality for Ongoing Creative Work?

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Ever since I launched my second podcast, this one, freetime, the one that you're listening to right now, people started asking me, how are you producing as much as you do? Especially because longtime listeners know by now I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to the size of my team, the smaller the better. I do like to say that I run a delightfully tiny media company. That's my current raison d'. Etre. What I say when I introduce myself if I don't say, oh, I'm an author and burnt substacker. And while it's true that there's no way I could do anything that I do without a team, particularly the incredible group at One Stone Creative. They have taken so much of the day in the life of a podcast episode off of my plate and that has changed my life. But still, I'm producing a lot and it tends to raise eyebrows. And sometimes those raised eyebrows reflect back to me and I go, should I slow down? Should I produce less? I don't know. First of all, this is all an experiment. Everything I'm going to share today is an in my experience, what I've tried kind of thing. But I've noticed something interesting, that when I lower the quantity of what I produce, the quality does not necessarily improve. Right Now, I produce 14 podcast episodes a month across pivot free time and BFF bonuses for my private community. I'm also back on my full newsletter schedule now. Now that I've moved over to Substack, which includes six posts for Rolling in Dough, my personal essays about running a business, the kind of less shiny parts that I'm excavating, I produce a weekly time well spent newsletter for free time, twice monthly Pivot list roundups, and one to two mailers for the BFF community. That's a lot. So that's 14 podcast episodes and 14 essays or newsletters. Now, listen, I am not saying that every single one of those things is brilliant. What I am saying is that the times that I do less, I tend to show up for myself less. And then I end up getting so blocked that I don't do anything at all. I remember when I stopped the Pivot podcast for a week. This was back in 2019. I was actually applying to seminary school at Union in New York City. And I thought, oh, I'm behind. Of course, at that time I was the bottleneck because I was managing a sort of Frankenstring of systems and various contractors. And I remember thinking, well, I'm behind. I need a week. Give me a minute. I didn't announce anything to Pivot listeners or newsletter subscribers. Week turned into two weeks, turned into three weeks. Next thing I know, it's six months and I have been radio silent. What happened was my momentum slowed down, inertia set in, and then every passing week became harder and harder and harder to do the thing. So even though I don't always want to show up when I feel, oh, it's a podcast recording day. Oh, I'm going to the studio. I don't want to burn money if I just sit there and stare at the walls or, oh, how am I going to come up with a solo episode every Friday for free time? I keep myself on track. I try not to jump to, well, I better reduce the quantity of what I produce because I know myself without these deadlines, without this accountability, I probably won't produce much at all. And this, what I do here, talking to you, writing to you, for you, with you, alongside you, this is the favorite thing that I do. That's the thing about consistency and quality. There's not always an inverse relationship between the two. At least for me. Maybe for you, too. I'll link to a Rolling in Dough post that people got a kick out of in the show notes called Love that for you, which is a little inside joke now. Little keyword that when someone's giving Advice that doesn't necessarily resonate with you or that makes you feel bad, that holds you back from doing your work even imperfectly. You can just append for you to what they're saying. Their advice works for them. And this is something you're going to try for me or for you? Okay, we're getting lost now. Quotes about consistency used to really annoy me. And I feel like there's so much in business and productivity and peak performance culture about, like, consistency. It's the most important thing. And your audience will lose trust if you miss a week or you miss a day. I don't buy into that at all. I think over the long haul, I've been doing this 18 years. Yes, consistency matters over a long duration of time if you're playing the long game, as my friend Dori wrote a book about. But I wanna build the kind of audience that can be forgiving when I hit a rough patch or things are going on in my personal life and I do need to take a step back. So I personally am not such a fan of consistency at all costs or else your entire business and creative projects are going to collapse. But I am finding a very curious relationship between consistency and not letting myself off the hook in terms of quantity. Now, with that said, I can just hear your voice because I can hear my own saying, that's not possible. No one can produce that much content. 14 podcasts and 14 essays and newsletters a month, like, that's insane. What are you thinking? What are you doing? Okay, when my energy goes away and I can no longer do that, no problem. I will adjust. I'm not saying here as I record this that I'm going to do that forever and ever for the rest of time. That's another really important thing that if you're running your business, I do think you need to check in and pause from time to time. Especially when you hit a plateau where you just aren't enjoying the thing anymore. I definitely don't believe in publishing mediocre stuff just to hit a deadline. No, that's not what we're talking about. In fact, for the first six months again of 2023, I hardly published any newsletters at all. I was not enjoying this experience of logging in to my newsletter software. I didn't really feel inspired. I didn't know what to write. I wasn't reading newsletters anymore. They were just buried off in a folder of my inbox that I never saw and I didn't want to add to the noise. That's why I left social media a decade ago because I stopped enjoying it myself. So I didn't want to just stand on a soapbox and yell into the void, knowing that I wasn't going to care to stick around to read what anyone else had to say in return. It wasn't until I started rolling in dough in the summer, so that was the first pivot or shift. I started writing deeply personal essays about running a business, something I had never really written about in this way before. The personal essay style, narrative telling stories really challenged me, so that kind of raised the bar on how I was showing up. Even for myself. I had a whole new skill set to learn. I hired a writing coach. I started kind of raising the bar of not just the quality of my writing, but the vulnerability of what I was sharing, or the realness or the things that I had previously felt scared of talking about. And in giving myself permission to shift what I was creating, I also fell in love with the software. And you know, I'm not one to advocate jumping to shiny new software tools especially. A lot of us have sunk costs in the systems we've already invested in and set up and customized and have these like, intricate workflows in our business. But the substack experience was so delightful. I could even edit essays or newsletters from my phone or from my iPad. And so I started to feel like, ooh, this is exciting. It actually makes me want to log in. The fact that I could tag other substackers, the fact that people could leave comments and heart and restack. All of a sudden my motivation started to come back. There was more intrinsic motivation around, hey, this is fun. And my newsletter isn't just gonna go off into the void and die in people's inboxes. There's actually ways here to cross post and cross promote and connect with other writers and podcasters. And it just started to become more fun. In my experience, once the momentum snowball of content creation is rolling, I don't want to stop it, but that doesn't mean that I feel like creating every bit of content every day. On the whole, these things energize me. And I genuinely do believe that if we're given the choice of what to work on in our business or creative projects, I talk in the book about uppercase hard work, where we're like, oh, this is so grueling. It's a grind. I'm suffering. I'm a martyr to the process versus lowercase hard work. Sure, things can be really intense, but hopefully intense in a good way, where you feel like you know why you're doing it. There's a bigger purpose. You are proud of yourself, and it's aligned with things that you do want to create in the world. Part of the reason that I do challenge myself to record a solo episode here every week is not because I'm confident that I have so much to say, but I know that I won't even go digging. I won't even synthesize what I'm learning or what I can share with you. Even things that I failed at or learned the hard way. I won't even attempt it if I don't have these deadlines. Contrast that with the Pivot podcast, where I do a solo episode I don't even know every couple months because it's a weekly production schedule. So I have so many guests coming through that I don't really need to do as many solos. And sure enough, when it comes time to record a solo episode for Pivot, I'm completely blank. I don't know what to say anymore. Now, part of that is that that podcast has been around for eight years, so it is more challenging to dig deep and think about what haven't I talked about or what is fresh for me. Truth, while it's fresh, is one of my values, but it's also hard because I'm just not in the habit of it. That brings me to I can't resist a little listicle of 5 things to consider as you examine your sweet spot, your ideal ratio of quantity to quality.

Number one, check your assumptions about causation versus correlation. Now, I probably don't have to tell you about the ice cream and the summer studies where this is the famous one where they decided that, oh, ice cream sales are correlated to crime. Okay, correlated. But ice cream sales don't cause more crime. It's just that in the summer there is more crime and there are more ice cream sales. So one does not cause the other. But they are correlated. Their graphs will follow a similar trajectory. The same thing might be true for quantity and quality. I think it might be easy to assume, oh, well, your quantity is so high that your quality must be low. Now, I am not going to make a claim to the quality of my work, okay? If anything, my husband, Michael and I were joking that we were going to start a new place called Mediocrity and just embrace being in the middle of the package. I am not the best podcaster. I'm not even in the top 100 for either of my shows, let alone probably 200. My books are not number one. Bestsellers. They have not made any fancy lists like the New York Times or USA Today. My attempts at quality really have nothing to do with the quantity of what I produce. I mean, someone might look from the outside and say that I can tell you with things like the book or my podcast episodes, I do my very best to do the best job I can. And I'm also fully aware every single time of how I've fallen short. And that's just part of my neuroses and my mindset. That's why I have the mantra 5149. I'll link to that in the show notes because I just try to be 51% confident and then 49 can still be a nervous wreck or, you know, feeling scared or not want to publish things again. If I need to take care of myself physically, if I'm going through something personally, that's different. But if I slow down production just assuming that my quality will raise, I have found for me, that's not necessarily true. Sometimes when I do less, I just fret more. And so by encouraging myself to set the bar high, to stretch a little bit, and to stick to my commitments when I book podcast studio time that I pay for, when I have a production team that I'm paying for and they're waiting on me, it helps me. It actually helps me rise to the occasion. And I end up coming up with ideas, maybe even at the last minute on the subway ride on my way to the studio that some of you will write in and say, this episode really helped me. Thank you so much. And it's that last minute deadline kind of thing that sometimes does kick in.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Number two, this relates to number one of causation versus correlation. Another assumption to check would be, oh, more time equals more money. Not necessarily. Or if I work less, I'll earn less. Not necessarily. Maybe working fewer hours requires firmer boundaries, smarter systems, increasing delegation. So just because you have more time or you give more time to something doesn't mean you'll earn more money, doesn't mean it will resonate better with your audience. It doesn't mean that you'll have to work any less. Like we know Parkinson's law, things expand the time you give for them. So it might be helpful to set some tighter boundaries and parameters on what you're producing and just kick it out the door. As my friend Mel says, she's not going to babysit her writing and that helps me remember to do the same. When we babysit, we nitpick, we become perfectionistic, and we end up not saying anything at all.

Consideration number three, don't confuse this with giving up too much, especially when it comes to your clients, primarily in the form of financial concessions that might even put you and your business or your ability to take care of your family at risk. I've noticed a tendency myself in earlier days and in clients. When they raise their prices, their impulse is to throw in the kitchen sink. That is not the kind of quantity that we're talking about here. When you do that, it's really sending a message that you're insecure about your price, you're not confident in the value you're delivering. So you're throwing in the kitchen sink and all these bells and whistles as a way to make up for that. What? While sort of trying to justify the price increase, resist the urge to do that. So when we're talking about your ratio of quantity to quality, if it comes to client work, of course we want the quality to be high, but we also don't want to overcorrect by throwing in quantity in order to raise the prices. That reminds me of the episode I did. I'll put it in the show notes on that famous triangle. My dad originally is the one who taught me about it because he used to do residential architecture and he'd say, clients always want things done quickly, at the highest quality and for the lowest cost. Well, pick two. If you want something done incredibly well and at a low cost, it is going to take more time. If you want something done quickly and at a low cost, it's probably not going to be high quality. So it's true that sometimes, let's say in your overall content production, you are making some choices. You probably can't produce the quantity at super high quality without investing money in a team, without delegating and getting some help.

Consideration number four Less energy doesn't necessarily mean that you have less to say. Sometimes I notice a tendency that when I'm feeling good, of course, who wouldn't be more excited to record and write and talk to the community? And then when I'm feeling low energy, I just want to sink into the couch and do nothing at all. But there are times where when I have less energy, the walls come down, I have less patience, I might get a little more quick to be annoyed. Then my inner curmudgeon comes out. Then I could go on a rant. I rein this in a little bit. But sometimes those are the episodes or newsletters or essays that resonate most with people because other people say, oh, me too. I feel so seen. And so just a note to say that sometimes when you have less energy, good things can result. So even that doesn't mean that you shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes you can channel that less energy to really tap into why? And can you speak to the things that are draining you or draining your energy in just as intelligent of a way as you can to stand up and talk about expertise? I'm noticing with rolling in, do I keep having this urge. It's just this compulsion to be an expert, and I don't want that. That project has been such a relief because I gave myself full 100% permission not to show up as an expert in the context of that project. I do think that to write a book, to have a podcast even, there's some sense of feeling like, oh, okay, I have something to say on these topics, so there is some measure of expertise involved. But on the whole, I find it such a bigger relief to throw the expert hat out the window and just say, this is what's going on. This is what I'm learning. And sometimes that even frustrates me because I feel like, ugh, couldn't I have learned this already? Shouldn't I be over this by now? Or I picture myself in 10 years. Or even my readers who are 10 years older and wiser or 10 years farther ahead in their business going, ugh, this lesson. This is such an obvious one. You know, I can't believe she's struggling with this. But what else do we have? We're all sharing as we go. At least if you're somebody who's putting creative ideas and thinking out into the world and you just never know that the way you say or share something might be exactly what somebody else needs too.

The fifth and final consideration here of my non expertise listicle is Nothing Needs to be Forever. I just read a great post from Emily McDowell who is talking about her own recovery from burnout after running a very successful stationery business and even selling it and the fallout from that. And she just wrote a post for paying subscribers saying I've done it again. I'm back in my old habits of holding myself to impossible standards and trying to produce and show up for you and be super consistent. And that's just not where I'm at right now. So if you've paid money to be here, I'm happy to give you a refund. But what I can't do is keep overworking myself out of pressure to show up for you in a certain way, at a certain cadence. I really respect her writing that and I imagine even for myself now that I have these three different newsletters rolling in Dough, Pivot and Free Time. Each one of them has paying subscribers. What if I need to take a break from the whole thing? What if I do want to take three months off? What will I do then? What if I don't want to keep writing anymore at all? I will cross that bridge when I get to it. So one thing that helps me is just reminding myself nothing needs to be forever. I trust myself to be creative and resourceful in the moment if I need to make an adjustment or make things right for my readers. So if I need to take a month off, I'm pretty sure Substack now offers a way to pause people's payments. If I need to take three months off, I'll figure something out. If I need to halt everything altogether, I'll figure it out. I always find creative ways to make things right for people. Let's say there's a customer service flub. They order a workbook and it didn't arrive, or somebody even wants a refund on a course. I always try to throw in little extras when things go wrong. So if I were to shut down all three of the things that I'm doing, I don't want to earn revenue from these activities anymore. I would figure out how to make it whole for people, how to make it right. How to even sprinkle on extra surprise and delight. Kind of the abundance mindset, at least the one I like to have in my business, is giving something very generous. That is More than what anybody paid for, even if they paid for a year up front, for example. So figuring out how to give a refund, a partial refund, or giving extra bonuses, or who knows what that would look like. But I just remind myself when I get nervous about any kind of production schedule, the thing that does keep me going is nothing needs to be forever. So ride the momentum while it's here, because I know what it feels like when that momentum goes away. And I know that for myself, it's very, very hard to go from zero back to one. It's better, at least for me, in the long arc of my career and the long arc of creativity, to keep going and to not overly obsess if any one thing isn't perfect, but to keep making tiny tweaks to improve everything with every next release. Just the other day there was a rolling in dough essay that I just didn't love it. It was okay, and I'll look to remember which one and I'll put it in the show notes. And I remember thinking it was scheduled to go out in 30 minutes. And I said to Michael, I am watching this essay walk out the door knowing it's not where it could be, knowing it's not good enough, knowing that there was more I could have done, or I could have made it more concise, or I could have improved the storytelling in these certain ways. I was like watching it walk out the door knowing it just wasn't good enough, it wasn't where I wanted to be. You know what? I let it go anyway because it's more important to me right now to stick to my twice a week schedule so that I don't hold myself back, let things go imperfectly. And a lot of people replied, a lot of people commented. It did strike a nerve. Even though in my opinion, the gap between my taste and my talent, as Ira Glass says, was strong in that moment and on that day. But it was more important to me to ensure that it went out anyway on, on schedule. Not to make myself some kind of workhorse or to berate myself, or to say, like, you must produce again the day that the schedule and the commitment starts interfering with my mental health, with my physical health. No, of course I'm not going to do that. That's not the free time way. But having a schedule, having a quota of two personal essays a week is really helping me stretch. And sometimes the only way out of learning a new skill is through. You have to let a certain number of subpar essays go and breathe and be out in the world and be exposed to readers and feedback and even my writing coach. I'm always like terrified of what she's going to say, but that's it. It's so uncomfortable and yet it's worth it in the long arc of creativity. One thing that helps me is to make sure that the secondary benefits are align. So I'm not talking about producing content just to do it just because of shiny shoulds. We know here at free time we don't sail the sea of shiny shits. Align your production schedule with what you will be proud to produce. Secondary benefits might include networking. Like why do I do so many podcasts? Because it's the only way I make friends. I actually don't like going out at night. It interferes with my sleep. So one of my main forms of networking is having two podcasts. I am able to catch up with friends through my two shows and I'm able to read books to prepare for interviews for a lot of those episodes. And I love reading. I feel like I'm getting paid in a sense, even though the podcasts don't pay very much directly. But I love reading books as part of my quote job. So you hereby have permission to set yourself a schedule, even an ambitious one that makes you a little bit nervous but that you know would help you rise to the occasion. I also encourage you to look back at your own creative history. Are you somebody who works better with more constraints or fewer? What's your sweet spot? Because there's no one right answer. Thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to hear your sweet spot for quality and quantity. You can always leave me a voicemail@itsfreetime.com ask or send me a message at hi time.com have a beautiful rest of your day.

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