Podcamp Boston Preview: Podcasting’s Venn Diagram

 This Sunday, I’m going to be giving a talk at Podcamp Boston 3, and I wanted to give the Leet Geeks community an opportunity to get a preview of my talk. After Podcamp Boston 3, I’ll post a full video of the talk here at the Leet Geeks. For those interested in audio, I’ll do my best to facilitate that too.

In podcasting, as in life, we’re forced to wear multiple hats and perform multiple roles. It’s not unusual to meet someone who does everything top to bottom for their podcast. This could include writing, producing, recording, mixing, posting and SEO’ing. This doesn’t even begin to cover all of the roles one person in a one person operation can play. I’m primarily focusing on the creative side of your podcast and the technical side of your podcast.

On the left, we have your creative side. That’s the side that plans the shows, finds the stories you’re going to talk about, arranges the lights, figures out the flow of the show, creates the graphics and album art, etc. On the right, we have your technical side. For the sake of this conversation, I’m going to refer to the recording and mixing as something technical. There are many programs that exist where these processes are creative, but to simplify things a little bit, I’m going to refer to these things as technical. This is the side that chose the microphones and cameras, your distance to the microphone and camera, the mixing, which bit rate the file will be encoded at, validating the RSS feed, etc.

The whole point of this conversation is to easier facilitate the creation of your content. It’s about making it to the finish line faster without sacrificing any quality. It’s about enabling you to go outside and get some fresh air and exercise before piling into the Delorean for 80’s Flashback Cafe. the answer is spending less time in the middle of the diagram. In the area that I call sophisticated procrastination. It might seem like you’re getting things done, but in hindsight you realize that you were just spinning your wheels.

An example: I recently recorded a podcast without much of a thought towards and introduction. I recorded the interview and attempted to improvise an introduction. After about 20 minutes of flubbing take after take and attempting to edit something coherent together, I realized how much time I would have saved by writing an intro to the show out. I had already spent more time on the introduction than the interview and I wasn’t any closer to having the show done. While it seems like an easy solution at the time to write out an intro and record it, at the time I thought I was THIS close to finishing off the intro.

The point of multi-tasking is to take less time to complete a task, not longer. Remind yourself of this when you find yourself tweaking the CSS on your site and taking a final listen to your podcast before publishing it. I don’t want to accuse you of being as poor of a multi-tasker as I am, but it’s certainly possible.

By not planning ahead, I’m often sabotaging myself. My favorite example of this happened in my first few weeks on my current job. A reporter was going to an event in Manhattan and would at some point interview NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg. We had recently purchased a Zoom H4 recorder and she was going out into the field with the recorded by herself for the first time and she was a little nervous about using the device. I had reassured her that the recorder was all set and all she needed to do was press record. The following day she came back excited because of the interviews that she did. Once I loaded the audio into my machine, the file was completely empty. No audio on the SD card at all. When I handed her the recorder, I hadn’t checked to see what recording mode it was set to and it was set incorrectly. Instead of an interview with the mayor of New York, I had 12 minutes of silence. That’s the kind of mistake you only make once.

The key here is planning ahead so the part of your job it is to check the recording mode doesn’t get in the way of the part of your job it is to edit an interview. Proper planing is the key to successfully pull the circles in your Venn diagram as far apart as possible.

In short, that’s the feel for the talk at Podcamp. I’m going to go into more detail about the tools that people use to help accomplish these goals. Some people call them productivity apps, but I call them distractions. I’ll also be talking with attendees about their experiences in sophisticated procrastination and how they get things done.

How do you get things done? If you’ve got a podcast, what does your production look like? Let me know in the comments.