Let me guess, there’s more you feel like you need to be doing to improve your show than you possibly have time to do.
Sound about right?
With so much information, advice, guidance, and feedback coming at you from every direction on a daily basis, it’s easy to find your podcast’s to-do list quickly grow from a small handful minor tweaks and improvements to an endlessly complex list of potential marketing strategies, format changes, audience engagement ideas and more.
Worse, each item on the impossibly long list feels impossibly urgent, like it absolutely needed to be done yesterday if you want to have any chance at growing your show.
It feels like every day of inaction is a day wasted, where your competition pulls ever further ahead, leaving you gasping for breath, struggling simply to get your next episode out on time, let alone beginning to chip away at your list of improvements.
Frankly, it’s exhausting.
Recalibrate Your Timeframe
While it might seem like the problem is the number of items on your show’s to-do list, the real issue is the timeframe you’re associating with them needing to be implemented.
Although it might feel like everything is urgent, needing to be completed as soon as possible, that’s rarely the case.
Sure, everything on your list would be nice to have done before publishing your next episode, but those changes are far from necessary.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about making changes that result in meaningful improvement of your show and the growth of your audience, you need to reframe what the process is going to look like.
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”
You might have heard the variously attributed maxim before and it applies as much to improving and growing your podcast as it does to anything else.
Podcasting is a slow growth medium built on compounding returns, meaning that it’s going to take time, patience, and consistency. This goes for both your content delivery as well as your continual leveling up, experimentation, and improvement.
Rather than viewing your list of to-dos as needing to be done within the next month, start thinking about the improvements you want to make over the next two years.
Thinking in longer timeframes is not only more realistic, but it allows you to take the pressure off as you work toward them. Thinking long term builds in buffer time for when life inevitably happens, as it certainly will over that period of time.
Order Your Timeline
Once you’ve recalibrated your timeline for improvement to focus on a longer timeframe, it’s time to place your list of improvements on a timeline.
Look through the list of areas you want to improve on and give them a rating of 1–5 based on how impactful the change will be. Then, go through again and give each item another 1–5 rating on how urgent the task is.
Once you’ve made your ratings, add the two ratings together and place the items with the highest totals first on your timeline, adding the rest of the tasks on your list to the timeline in order of descending total rating.
Your timeline should be one dimensional, with only one task being listed at a given time. It’s impossible to work on two things simultaneously, so even if multiple items have the same rating, pick one to list first and complete it before moving on to the next one.
Habits Over Deadlines
I’d recommend against setting specific time deadlines for tasks or projects to be completed. It’s discouraging to miss a deadline, and when missed deadlines start piling up it can become all too easy to lose faith in the process and throw in the towel.
Instead, commit to a practice and build a habit around improving your show that isn’t task-oriented.
Dedicate an hour a day (or however much time you can commit) to working on improving your show, and during that hour, simply focus on working on whatever task is currently first up on your timeline.
If you finish the task within the hour, start on the next one. If you don’t, wrap up at the end of the hour and come back to it the next day.
Over the long run, habits like this will help you get far more done than focusing on specific tasks and deadlines.
Aim for Steady Improvement
By focusing on the long run and building habits around working on your show, you can ensure that the quality of your show will trend consistently upward as long as you continue to put in the work.
While it’s tempting to do a sprint to make as much improvement as possible over the shortest amount of time, this type of effort isn’t sustainable. As soon as you finish your sprint you’ll find another endless list of improvements to make and the cycle will start over.
Focus on what will truly move the needle for you and your show, and then consistently put in the work to move in that direction.
Every Sunday I send out an exclusive article on how to use podcasting to build an audience and grow your business.
No opt-in, no freebie no bribe. But hopefully a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom. It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
Jeremy travels full-time, loves long-distance cycle touring, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements. He believes that the way to grow sustainable businesses is by leading with heart, vulnerability, and helping your people be and become their best selves.
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