Episode 150 (Sprint Review) | 2130

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S04E30

4 years, 150 Episodes, 12.5hrs of audio, 9 Video Episodes and 160,000+ words of script. ‘Number goes up’ gives you a nice feeling. But the more energy spent caring about stats, the more numbers became a source of personal validation.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2021/08/10/301-2130-episode-150-sprint-review/

You can now watch 301 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/jayspringett

Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/
Webshow: http://comeinternetwith.me
Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo


Episode 150! (Sprint Review)

Hello! Time for another sprint review.

If you are from the future and currently binging this podcast as I know some of you do. Episode 100 was in July of 2020 or, about 4.1 hours away from here in the feed.

Back then, I spoke about creative discipline.

Doing something 100 times, I thought, was about the number of times required to decide if you actually enjoy doing the thing you keep doing over and over.

I won’t pretend that I’ve enjoyed making every episode of this podcast since the 8th of april 2018. But I have enjoyed making it more often than not.

The blood from a stone feeling I sometimes experience making the show is always quickly forgotten. Obscured by the rhythm of its weekly schedule. But also subsumed into the archive that has become ‘the body of work’.

In the last 4 years, I’ve made roughly 12.5hrs of audio, and have written about 160,000 words of podcast script.

Adding to this body of work every week has become more satisfying to me the longer I’ve been making the show. 

What I’ve come to care less and less about in the last year or so is my stats. Across all platforms. I am not ashamed to admit, that for the longest time the last thing I did before bed every night was checking my stats. 4 years ago it was exciting. Early episodes would have 17 people listen in the first week. How validating! The novelty! People are listening!

But this got out of hand. ‘Number goes up’ gives you a nice feeling. But the more energy I spent caring about my stats, the more numbers became a source of personal validation. For a while I ended up hanging parts of my identity around them. It was a big mistake. If an episode did well, I’d feel good for a week. But if the next episode didn’t do as well, it made me unhappy.

I spoke with a friend with a large audience about stats, emotions and wellbeing this year and they told me that 

  1. Every online creator goes through this. 
  2. All that these numbers, graphs and charts represent is proof of work. You did something and put it out in the world.

Caring about them keeps you stuck in the past. Checking them is an act of seeking validation from your past self rather than acting in the present. 

They provide no help with creating the next thing. If I had chased my stats as a strategy, then I would be making shows about stationary and bullet journals 24/7.

But this podcast and the body of work it leaves behind is supposed to be a product of the personal. I’d like it to continue to be.

With that all out the way though. I am aware that 301 is appraching the mentally significanct nuber of 100k all time downloads.

Can I get there by the end of the year? That would be nice. The math says maybe. But I don’t actually care. 

I’m just happy and grateful that others are happy to listen to this weird eclectic podcast with no theme other than it being personal one.

Speaking of personal, did you know that 50 episodes ago was when I set up a paid supporter page on my website? I only try to mention it every 25 mins of content as I hate shilling.

But please do consider heading to www.thejaymo.net/support and clicking the £30 a year option. The equivalent of just .57p an episode. Also, I may or may not be making a zine with an NFT inside in the near future. I want to offer a discount on physical copies to supporter before they go up for sale on the blog.

Anyways, as I’ve explained. Having gotten over my preoccupation with the stats this year. I sat down and thought very hard about what I personally want to get out of making this show. 

Year 1

Was about learning the discipline to make an episode every week. 

Year 2

Was about focusing on learning how to write. Appreciating the regular discipline had on my mental health. 

Year 3

Saw the abandonment of the constraint of making the show in 1 hour. Which allowed time to practice editing. The result being some of the episodes that I’m the most proud of. 

Season 4

Sees me now 8 Episodes in to producing a video version for Youtube in addition to the audio. A new arena for learning.

I had naively assumed that I could just film myself speaking, edit it and put that out as a video. This was a flawed assumption. 

I’m currently spending between 4 or 5 hours making this show now. Rather than the initial hour I set out to make it in back in 2018. 

It’s been a big change in tooling, workflow, and learning about cuts and video editing. It’s easy to go in and add a fraction of a second of silence into a podcast, but with video it’s not so simple. 

It’s far easier to make a podcast 301 seconds in length than a video podcast that’s for sure. 

But I’m sure I’ll get quicker the more that I do it. 

Maybe in another 150 episodes I’ll finally have a 3D jaymobot avatar that lip syncs to a wav file broadcasting out into the metaverse from my own moving castle.

That’s one possible future goal anyway. 

Thank you all so so much for listening.

Watch


The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the audio due to time constraints.

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  1. […] written before about how the weekly discipline of making this podcast weekly poduces a satisfying body of work in its […]

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