Podcasts are a surprisingly large part of my life these days.
Despite regularly thinking that I listen too much, I seem to slowly be picking up more shows. Tech related talk and interviews sum up my tastes decently. I stay away from pure news shows. The kind of news I am interested in will generally sneak in anyway and I never feel a need for yet more breathless reporting of events as they happen. I get much more out of a thoughtful discussion from a personal perspecitve two weeks after the fact than I do from frantically reloading twitter to try and glimpse the future seconds before everyone else.
Then, there is the production side as well. Being a part of Kodsnack is a frequent source of joy, and although it happens rarely I often think that I would like to participate in more shows. I find myself getting more and more into the habit of collecting potential subjects for episodes, thinking about content, form, editing or what have you. Recording and publishing my voice regularly was never anything I would have seen myself doing in the future, and I am gaining a lot in the process.
I feel that I have found a good balance with Kodsnack, in that I enjoy it without needing to spend more time than I enjoy on it. That is, I keep the fun. It does not feel like work. Well, apart from importing into Garageband and waiting for exports to finish …
Simplify, simplify
As with so many other activities involving multiple steps, there are certain steps in the production of an episode of Kodsnack which just feel heavy. You know, those parts of something which may actually be a very small part of the total but turn out to be the things which feel like real obstacles or boring busywork when you think about them. In the case of Kodsnack, those steps are importing and lining up the tracks in Garageband and exporting them once editing is finished.
Now that I write it down, that looks very much like the steps where I am waiting for the computer to finish its business.
On one side, I would really love to speed those two steps up radically. On the other, they demand no attention and are over with quickly enough that I have not quite managed to work up the energy to research improvements. So far, I pretty much stick to phantasies of doing the work on a Mac pro which would (in my dreams, I have no clue how suited it actually is to this job) just rip through the tasks without breaking a sweat.