92: Why You Should Conduct a Time Study for Your Podcast

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I have been a podcaster for four years. I am a podcast coach. I've got about 350 clients in my podcast accelerator program and I've taken two shows past 100,000 listens and 100,000 dollars monetized. And today I want to tell you a story of a realization that I had that made all of the difference in me actually getting my podcast to six figures and learning how to be a six figure podcaster. And at the end of this story, I'm going to share with you an exercise that will help you find your inefficiencies and some places in your monthly schedule where you probably have some quick wins waiting for you if you just have your attention brought to them. So our story begins in early 2019. Now at this point in time, I had been podcasting for eight months. For five of those months, I had been podcasting full time. So basically I launched my first podcast when I was a software developer at a big health insurance company. Three months after launching my show, I decided to leave that job to go all in on my podcast. And six months after leaving that job, I was in a position where my show had not really grown. I had not monetized my podcast at all and I was running out of money. In fact, I was going into debt. Now I am somebody who is super stubborn. So at that point in time, I considered it failure to get another job in retrospect. I now recognize that getting a job was not failure. In fact, failure would have been being too stubborn and not doing what I needed to do in order to keep my own financial health while also building out my podcast. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and even the New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guest's internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech, but easy to use. On like Zoom, you don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either. And did I mention that the audio quality is way better? If you're recording your interviews remotely, get off of Zoom now and hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Head over to Riverside.fm and use code Grow that's GROW to get 63 minutes of recording and 15% off a membership plan. The link is in the show notes. So here's where the story begins. Basically, I was at a position where I had been working on the show for eight months. I had been working on the show full time. So more than 40 hours per week for six months and my audience was not growing and I wasn't making any money. Now during that time period, I was cranking out content and I was super, super, super consistent. So I was putting out more content than ever, spending most of my time producing that content. I did not understand why the show was not monetized and why it wasn't growing. I was confounded. So what I did was I actually took a break from the podcast. I was in a place where I was just about to run out of cash and what I was doing wasn't working and I said, okay, I'm going to put the show on hold for just a couple weeks. Get my bearings, take some time to study other podcasts and see what they're doing and see if the successful podcasts are doing something different than what I'm doing. So I did that. I totally did discover that the podcasters that were successful were doing different things. They were spending their time differently than I was spending mine and that was the reason why my show wasn't growing and that's what I realized that I was doing things that podcasters who don't have audiences do to grow and monetize and big surprise. I also didn't have an audience and I also wasn't monetized. So I looked towards podcasters who are more successful than I was and saw that they were doing things differently and said, okay, I should probably behave like that. Now, instead of just doing what they did, at the same time, I also discovered an exercise which I'm going to share with you today, which totally changed the way that I looked at my podcast and that exercise is called a time study. So a time study is where you actually log how you spend your time down to the minutes, super annoying. You can either do it on paper or you can do it in a spreadsheet, but basically as you go about your day, every time you start or end a task, you log that. Now, if you're somebody who is back and forth between your phone and back, you know, multitasking all the time, it's especially annoying because every time you switch tasks, you have to log that. And that in itself is its own thing when you go to do a time study and you realize over the course of the first four hours of your day, you didn't spend more than three minutes at a time doing one thing, but that wasn't a lesson that I learned here. The lesson that I learned here was that I was terrible at remembering how I spent my time. And let me explain. At this moment in time, I was so confused as to why my show wasn't growing and monetizing. I was telling myself, I have spent so much time on this. I've spent so much time trying to figure out how to monetize my show and I've spent so much time trying to grow my audience. I don't understand why it's not working. Then I did a time study. So in 2019, I spent six months where I logged in my notebook, everything that I did as long as I was awake for six entire months. And this is something that gets really easy once you build the habit. It's hard for like a week and then it just becomes a habit and it's actually really easy to do. And so I logged my time for six months. And when the six months was up, I decided to go back and look at all the time that I spent and tell you up how much time I spent on different things. And here's where I learned the lesson that changed the way I look at this game. I said, okay, I'm going to look at all the time that I spent on my podcast, my podcast that isn't growing. It's not monetized. And I'm going to see how much time I actually spent trying to monetize my show and how much time I actually spent trying to grow it. And the results were astounding. Now over those six months that I measured my time, number one, my audience did not grow at all. Number two, I had tried monetizing, but colon quote, it didn't work. Number three, I was spending tons of time editing my show. I was actually super annoying and prideful about how much time I was spending editing my content. And number four, time and money was running out. So what did I learn after reviewing my time? Well, I have the numbers in front of me here. So over those six months in 2019 that I measured my time really closely, I created 24 episodes of my first podcast, Philly Ho. And here's how the time stacked up over that time. So over the course of six months, I had spent 240 hours editing my podcast myself. So that's 10 hours per episode. I had spent 160 hours making social media content. Now this was back in 2019 where there weren't, there was no descript. There weren't all these fancy audio gram tools. So I was literally making audio grams in like video editing software, like making the animations myself. So all in all, I spent 400 hours editing my podcast and creating social media promo content. It's a lot of time, right? Here's where it gets crazy. I spent 60 hours planning, inviting guests, communicating with guests, commuting to guests. I spent 50 hours interviewing those guests. So that's 110 hours. So now we're at 510 hours spent on my podcast. None of that, which is spent growing my audience or monetizing. And here's what's crazy. Over those six months after which I told myself I tried monetizing and it didn't work. I don't know why my audience isn't growing. When I looked back at the time that I had spent, I had spent a grand total. Of six hours trying to figure out better ways to grow my audience. Only six in the course of six months. And guess how many hours I spent trying to monetize my podcast in those six months? Now, mind you, after six months, I said I tried that it didn't work. I had spent a grand total of four hours over the course of six months trying to monetize my podcast. And after only four hours of trying it and it not working, the story that I told myself was I tried that it didn't work. Now, when you put it that way, of course it didn't work after only four hours. Nothing works after only four hours if you've never done it before. And so after these six months, what I discovered is that over six months, I had spent 520 hours on my podcast and only 10 of those hours. I spent trying to figure out how to grow my show and monetize it. What do you think I did after I discovered this? I spent more time trying to grow my audience and I spent more time trying to monetize my show. What happened next? I was able to grow the audience past 100,000 downloads and able to monetize the show, past $100,000 monetized. And that was through sponsorships, it was through live events, it was through a Patreon, it was through merch sales, it was through selling my time as a freelance editor, several other ways. And so the lesson was that this whole time I had been spending all of my time creating content and telling myself a story that I had spent tons and tons of time trying to grow and monetize my show and that I hadn't figured it out and that it didn't work for on quote. When in actuality I had spent very little time growing and monetizing my show and that's because it's very uncomfortable to spend time doing things that you don't know how to do. I knew how to make content, I knew how to edit my podcast, I knew how to make social media content and so I spent 400 hours plus doing what I already knew how to do and the whole time I only managed to get myself to spend 10 hours trying to figure out how to do the thing that I didn't know how to do. Now since learning this lesson, I now am almost always tracking my time and I'll be honest, I go in and out of practice with that and so the cadence is usually I will start tracking my time, I will see how I'm not spending it totally wisely and I'm misremembering how I spent it, you know, thinking that I spent all this time on something where I really spent very little time on it and not realizing how much time I was spending on dumb things and so I start measuring it and as soon as I start measuring my time then I see this and I spend it better and then, you know, after a while I slack and I stop measuring my time and then I start to drift again and this is the cycle. So nowadays on average I do a time study once every three months. Like I said, what that does is it allows me to really, really know how I'm spending my time and it allows me to avoid telling myself stories about how I've spent my time that aren't true. So here's my challenge to you. As we begin 2023, I challenge you to complete a time study for just one week and during that week meticulously record every second of how you spend your time. If you actually manage to do this a couple of things are going to happen for you. Number one, just the fact that you are observing how you're spending your time is going to make you more productive that week. So I personally bet that you will have one of the most productive weeks you've had in a while simply because you don't want to have to write down the dumb stuff that you do all the time and getting distracted is a pain in the neck because every time you check your phone that means you're going to have to write down that you did that or you're going to have to put it in a spreadsheet that you did that pain in the neck so it's actually easier to stay focused. So number one, that week that you do the time study, you're going to have the most productive week you've ever had. But number two is you're just going to see patterns in the way that you spend your time that are surprising to you and you're going to see quick win improvements that you can make about how your time is spent. And so I'll give you one that I just got. Now fast forward to today, Grow the Show has 12 full time employees. We've got more than 350 clients in the podcast accelerator. We've got thousands of folks on the email list and listeners of the podcast and we're doing several seven figures in revenue and I still fall into the same trap. So this time when I did my time study, what I discovered is that I was spending my mornings insanely inefficiently. So every day I have three hours blocked in the morning from 6.30 am to 9.30 am and I call that my one thing time. That's the time for me to focus uninterrupted where most of my team and the people in my life are asleep and it's dark out in the morning and I can really focus on getting something done whether it's some writing or some recording or you know, solving some sort of difficult solve problem in the business. And so most recently when I did my time study, at that time I was telling myself a story that I was spending all of this time in my one thing time super focused and it wasn't enough. And so the story I was telling myself is, I need to add more focused time to my schedule each and every day than I did my time study. And when I did that, I discovered that I was not spending my one thing time effectively. I wasn't staying focused. I was switching from task to task. I was allowing myself to get distracted whether it's, you know, going to get some breakfast or taking the dog for a walk or just avoiding whatever task I needed to get done. And so after just one week, I looked at my time study and saw how fragmented the time was that I was telling myself that I was staying focused. And then I was like, oh, I don't need more allocated one thing time on my calendar. I need to actually use the time that I've already allocated to my calendar in the way that I originally intended it. And so what happened? I discovered that I actually needed less focused time on my calendar than I had blocked. So it wasn't that I hadn't blocked enough. It's that I hadn't actually used it in the way that I promised myself I would. And I needed less than what I blocked. So this is an exercise when I first discovered it got me unstuck with podcast growth and monetization. And every single time I returned to it, it shows me the reality of how I'm spending my time. And it proves wrong. The stories that I'm telling myself about how I'm spending my time. So long story short, I highly encourage you to complete a time study next week. So beginning on Monday, all the way through to Sunday night, whether it's in a notebook or in a spreadsheet, record how you spend your time to the tea down to the minute. And if you can't do a minute, you can do 15 minute increments. And notice how you're not spending your time as you think you are. And I trust that you are going to number one, get huge wins from that. You're going to be able to make little tweaks into how you're spending your time that are going to give you massive, massive results. And you might even like me discover that you are telling yourself a story about how you've spent your time that isn't serving you because it's not true. So that is it for this episode of Grow the Show. If you got value from this, please let us know in the Grow the Show Facebook group. And if you do decide to do a time study, I'd love to hear what you find. So you can either DM me on Instagram at Kevin Schmidland or you can share it in the free Grow the Show Facebook group. We would love to hear what you learned in your time study. So yeah, I hope you got value from this. Hopefully this helps you get closer to your podcast growth and monetization goals. That's going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. I will see you in the next one.