I enjoy making special episodes of podcasts every now and then. This week, we ended up not recording any regular episode of Björeman // Melin // Åhs, so I took the opportunity to record and release a little … confession, I guess?
The thing is, Jocke started predicting/teasing that I would get myself a Apple display of some sort pretty much as soon as my 4K Dell monitor broke down. Me being me, I of course hated the idea of being so predictable, and so put myself into a lot of completely self-generated but kind of fun trouble when I ended up buying a Studio display very soon thereafter.
What to do? How about: deny everything for four months, then release a solo episode of your common podcast about it? I can not think of a stranger way to resolve the situation, so I think it is perfect.
It is certainly 💯% me.
I made more detailed notes than usual for the episode, especially when you consider the final length. I think the recording ran for 16 minutes, and the actual episode came out at just over 13. I was conscious when I wrote them that I was making the kind of notes which are likely to restrain me, rather than give me new ideas and sidetracks. More of whole sentences with a flow between them than a bullet list. Or more of a blog post than notes for a discussion. The reason this type of notes restrain me is that I remain conscious of the flow, on the sentence level as well as the paragraph and whole document level. The note starts in one place, and inevitably drag me along toward its written conclusion, and I think my mind snaps into a sort of recital mode where it focuses on playing the things back as written rather than seeing opportunities to go off script.
So, if I had written fewer words, I may have produced a longer episode. But I am not sure that would have been a real benefit to anyone.
(I am curious, though, if I will some day sit down and record a 90-minute episode of any podcast all by myself. What would the notes for something like that look like? Can I learn to set my mind to detour and dialogue mode despite the fact that I am talking to myself?)