Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - Speed Up Your Podcast Production with Time blocking, Deadlines, and Investing in Yourself

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Do you feel like your podcast is taking you way too long to produce? Or maybe you haven’t even launched yet because just starting seems endless?   Parkinson’s Law might have something to do with it. And today, I’m going to teach you how to break the law.    In this episode, you'll learn how to speed up your podcast production process by: Setting real deadlines Time blocking Finding ways to hold yourself accountable   *** Live Online Training: Podcast Interview Perfection    Does this sound like you?   You started your podcast to show up as a leader, but now you worry your interviews make you look like an awkward robot.    Breaking the ice with online guests you’ve never met feels forced.   Your conversations sound like job interviews. The kind that make people nervous.   If you feel sick before an interview and pray the guest cancels last-minute so you don’t have to do it, congratulations on being a totally normal human being.    Most of us aren’t born with amazing interview capabilities. It’s a skill we learn.   And developing your interview skills is essential if you want your podcast to portray you as both an expert in your field, and as someone your listeners want to work with.   May I offer you a shortcut to dramatically improve your podcast interview skills?   You are invited to a live online training Podcast Interview Perfection.    In this training, you will learn how to:   show up like a leader during the interview and guide the conversation so your audience gets the most out of it find your ideal podcast guests and get them to say ‘yes’ to coming on your show set up your podcast guest booking system come up with great questions and outline a show that deliver the most value for your audience prevent podcast guest no-shows break the ice with your guest and begin the interview in a fun way that puts your guest at ease record remote interviews that sound great (all the tech simplified) interview with confidence even if you’re a rookie get your guest to promote their episode and more!   After the training, you’ll have the opportunity to ask any interview questions you want. You’ll also have the opportunity to submit questions before the training so that they can be incorporated into the workshop.   Grab your spot at the early bird rate at sarahmikutel.com/podcastinterviewDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Do you feel like your podcast is just taking up way too much of your time? Or maybe you haven't even launched yet because just getting started feels endless. Well, Parkinson's law might have something to do with this. And on this episode, I'm going to teach you how to break the law. Have you been wanting to start a podcast for a while now, but something's holding you back? Maybe it's fear of putting yourself out there or confusion about the technology. I'm Sarah Mikital and on podcasting step by step. I'll break down how to podcast with a little loving motivation to give you the skills and the confidence you need to finally launch that show of your dreams. Let's get started.

I came out with my online course podcast launch academy last year, but really, I should have put it out two or three years ago. So what took me so long? Well, I didn't give myself a proper deadline. And so I just kept filling the space with different tasks that I could do researching. What is the best course software? Rewriting my sales page 50 million times. And this is what Parkinson's law is. It says that a task is going to take as long as you give it. And so if we don't have an end date, it never ends. This week, something shocking happened to me. I created a new live training podcast interview perfection in two days. I have never achieved something so fast. So how was I able to achieve this? Well, I have mentioned before that one of my business

mentors is Elizabeth Goddard. And I love her courses. I love her trainings. So I took a course of hers called Quick Paid Live trainings. And she gave a challenge to all of us who were new to the course that if we finished creating our paid live training within two weeks, she was going to promote it to her entire email list. And so remember a few weeks ago, I mentioned that one of the best ways to grow your show, or the best way actually, is to get in front of other people's audiences. So how great she's going to promote us to her whole email list. Well, that was a really huge motivator for me. I had a specific deadline that I was working toward. And there was a nice reward at the end of it. So I turned it around. I had to decide which course I wanted to do. And I decided to do one on how to improve your podcast interviewing skills because I've been getting asked a lot about that lately. I'm quite lucky that I've been interviewing people as part of my career for years, for most of my career. I have a journalism background. I have a creative writing background. And so I've interviewed people as part of my job, you know, for a really long time.

And so I kind of forgot that this is definitely a skill you need to develop. And so if you've never interviewed anyone before, of course it's going to be a little bit nerve-wracking. And I had people telling me that they feel like they sound like a robot, that they didn't know how to break the ice. And the interview just felt awkward because they weren't really sure how to lead it. They were worried that their interviews sounded like job interviews, like boring job interviews. Or they just didn't do an interview yet because they were too scared to do it and they didn't feel like they had the authority and they just didn't know what they were doing. So I thought, okay, I definitely want to do a course on how to improve your podcast interviewing skills. So if you want to take part in this paid live

training, then you can go to sarahmicatel.com slash podcast interview perfection. And I'll tell you more about that later in this episode. So because I had a deadline to work with for this online training, That allowed me to fill in the steps of everything that I needed to do to hit that deadline. And that's a principle you can use to launch your own podcast, your own course, or just do the work that you need to do for your individual episodes. So we're fighting Parkinson's Law. We are only doing the work that we need to do and we're going to be doing focused work. So how can we do that? Well, time blocking. So I've mentioned this before in the podcast, but it's really a very simple yet revolutionary, I want to say, method of working. And time blocking is exactly what it sounds like.

You are blocking off specific time on your calendar to do specific tasks. And usually you are doing like a minimum of 25 to 30 minutes of really focused work, like maximum 90 minutes. You don't want to go past that. So you're really doing like deep dive focus work where you're not taking a break to check the internet, to check Facebook. You are just completely in the zone, getting your work done. You're not bouncing around from task to task. You're just getting that task done that's like right in front of you. Then you're taking a little bit of a break. And if you want to do what's called the Pomodoro technique, you can do, you know, work, then take a little bit of a break. So maybe like work 25 minutes, five minute break, work 25 minutes, and so on. And that really just

helps avoid procrastination, avoid multitasking. So you can really just focus on the task at hand. And when you're time blocking, you can see on your calendar how you are spending your time. But you will also, as you're doing, starting to do this really focus work, you're going to realize how much time you actually are wasting. Like maybe you think you're spending four or five hours on show notes. But really, you're starting your show notes and then you have an idea and you want to research it so you go look up something on the internet and then all of a sudden you're on Facebook for half an hour. It's so, so easy to go on these rabbit holes. But if you are doing your fixed, like focused work through your time blocking, you could maybe bang out your show notes,

like a rough outline. Then if you have some things that you want to research, you can give yourself like five minutes to go and look something up. And if you can't find it, maybe scratch that. instead of doing like three hours of research on like a one liner of your show notes, right? And then you can fill things in from there. So get time on the calendar to podcast. There's more than one way to do your podcast work. You could do a batch podcast process where different days of the week are dedicated to different things. So maybe one day you're recording, one day you're editing, one day you are doing the show notes and the social media posts. And so you're just doing really focused work. And maybe you're as part of this batch process, you're doing more than one episode at

once. So you're outlining three episodes worth of show notes. You are recording three episodes. You are editing three episodes. And then you're filling in your show notes and creating articles and social media posts based on your podcast. Lots of people love to batch record their podcasts. And it really is a time saver and can just, you know, make your podcast process flow a lot easier. However, there are lots of podcasters who love podcasting and they don't want to, you know, batch six shows and then not have to think about their podcast again. They love doing their podcast every week. And time blocking helps you do that weekly show without having it take 10 hours of your week. Again, because of that really concentrated and focused work.

Now, when you are putting your tasks on the calendar, think about where your energy levels are going to be for that specific task. For instance, as you heard on my podcast episodes on voice and vocal training, if you're really tired, that's going to show up in your voice. And so try to make sure that you're recording in the morning. I also really love to do my most creative work in the morning. Most of us are at like people. performance in the morning. And so that's when I like to do a lot of writing. Editing doesn't take as much mental energy. And so I would save that for the afternoon. So just think about where your energy levels are at. And also, you know, when you're least likely to be disturbed. So you know your life. Think about it when you are planning out your work on your calendar. I find it really helpful to schedule my upcoming week on a Friday. And it's become really sort of like a sacred time for me, not to be dramatic, but as I mentioned, I am not, well, maybe I didn't mention on this show, but I've definitely mentioned in the past that I'm classic aneagram nine. I am not a

natural planner. And so since I've started implementing these best practices, like productivity practices in my life, I have just felt like a lot saner and calmer and have achieved a lot more in a faster period of time because I've been more intentional on how I'm spending my time. And so on Friday, I like to plan what I'm going to be doing that upcoming week. And so like you, probably, I've got a to do list of like 2,000 items. But I know I'm not going to achieve everything on that list. And that's where I went wrong in the past. And maybe you've had issues with this too, where you have so much you want to do that you don't end up doing any of it, because either you're paralyzed and don't know where to start, so you just don't start, or you try to do

a little bit of everything and then nothing gets done. And so what I like to do is I will grab the priorities off of my to-do list. So when I was creating my online training, I knew what needed to get done what day. And so I time blocked that into my calendar. So again, on Friday, I will plan out the priorities for the following week. And that is definitely something that comes with practice. Because at the beginning, when we are time blocking, we always bite off more than we can chew. We don't give us enough break time. We tend to way underestimate how long it's going to take us to do something. And so I wouldn't beat yourself up if you start time blocking and you're like, I am not achieving anything. You'll realize what you can achieve in a day. And then you can be much more

intentional and just practical on what goals you can achieve. And then it starts to feel really good when you are able to tick those boxes and see them adding up to what you want to do. So time blocking takes practice, but just play around with it, iterate it until you find a rhythm that works nicely for you. Now you might be thinking, well, I have tried time blocking before and it doesn't work for me. It's very easy to start putting things on the calendar. But if we aren't rigid with those deadlines, we're like, well, do I really need to do that? Or we'll like block out a blank time to do something. But we didn't fill it up with like a specific something. And so then we're back into our analysis paralysis of should I work on this? Should I work on that? So that goes back. again to let's be really specific on what we are working on in our time blocked hours. And you can even give yourself an end date for time blocking. So you could say, all right, I'm going to try time blocking for 30 days. I don't mean you have to time block everything for like an entire 30 days, but maybe say every Friday for 30 days. I'm going to time block my upcoming week and I'm actually

going to follow through it with what I've set out for myself. Or I guess they say 66 days is how long it takes to create a habit. So maybe commit to 66 days of doing a real serious time blocking practice. I find that if you're starting something new, it's kind of like exercising, right? Like if you have fallen out of the habit, it's really hard to get started if we're just thinking of like forever we're going to have to do this thing that we can even motivate ourselves to do on day one. But if we think, I only have to do this for 66 days, it makes it feel a lot more achievable. And we're much more likely to start something if we can like see the end line. And then hopefully you will have acquired a good

time blocking habit. And so I think that's going to make your podcasting life so much easier. Another thing that you can do is find an accountability partner. So you find like a friend or a colleague or maybe somebody in like a Facebook group of something that you're interested in. And both of you have goals that you want to achieve and you want somebody to like keep you to task. And maybe you're meeting once a week for like half an hour to say, okay, did you do this? Did you do that? Did you do this? The problem with accountability partners sometimes or quite often I've noticed is,

you both stopped holding each other accountable. Like, it's so easy for an excuse to pop in. Like, well, I wasn't really feeling good. The kids were doing this. Blah, blah, blah, blah. What I find to be really motivating is putting money where your mouth is, right? Like, there's different accountability apps that you can get. There's one called Stick, STI, C-K-K-K, and you pledge money that you're going to achieve something. And if you don't do it, you don't get that money back. It'll either go to a charity of your choice or if you want to really motivate yourself, it could go to an organization that you really despise. So maybe you are super anti-gun and your money is going to go to the NRA. So lots of people have found that to be motivating. Also, doing an online course or hiring a coach,

when you start making that financial investment in yourself, you start showing up at a whole different level. I mean, think about free things that you've downloaded. Think about different virtual summits that you've signed up for like free virtual summits that offer a replay. Chances are you're just going to watch the replay or you're going to say you're going to watch the replay. And then you never, you never watch it because we don't respect free as much as when we're paying for something. And free can keep us in the consumption phase rather than the action-taking phase. If you're like me, you listen to a ton of different podcasts. You are learning so much. But are you implementing what you're learning in your podcast, in your business? Often we need to put our money

where our mouth is. And to take our podcasts and our businesses to the next level, we need to invest in courses, in coaching so we can get this step by. step of what we need to do. For example, podcast interviewing. If you are the type of person who just feels totally sick before you've got to do a podcast interview and you're just praying that your guests cancels last minute so you don't have to do it, then I think you are really going to love my online training podcast interview perfection. You will learn how to show up like a leader during the interview and really guide the conversation so your audience gets the most out of it. You will learn how to find your ideal podcast guests and get them to say yes to coming on your show. You will learn how to

set up the tech of your guest booking system and how to record remotely. I will teach you how to come up with really great questions and how to outline a show that really delivers the most value possible for your audience. And how to prevent podcast guest no shows that actually almost never happens to me. And how to get your guest to promote their episode and really so much more. And there will be a live Q&A afterwards, and you can also submit your questions to me in advance of the training so I can incorporate them into the event. Visit sarah micotel.com slash podcast interview perfection to learn more, and make sure that you book soon so you can take advantage of the super low early bird rate. Once again, if you want to get over your podcast interview awkwardness and learn to lead conversations

that listeners really love, you are not going to want to miss this training. visit sarah micotel.com slash podcast interview perfection. Thank you for listening to podcasting step by step. You are now one step closer to launching that podcast you've been dreaming about, but I want to get you even closer. I created a free guidebook for you with actionable worksheets called Eight Mistakes New Podcasters Make and How to Fix Them. To find that, head on over to sarahmicatel.com slash fix.

Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot. I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.