Another abandoned podcast?

Welcome to the Offline Online Podcast.

My name’s Andrew, and it’s been a while.

Much like many others who have started a podcast on a whim, I thought about stopping making this podcast after a few months lacking the drive to record.

Offline life has been fairly busy, and to be honest, I’ve been in a bit of a rut professionally, which I’ve been trying to work through.

I’ve made a couple attempts to record an episode, only to be disappointed with the resulting podcast, lacking any real purpose or topic.

Realising I’ve probably pigeonholed myself in my mind for this podcast to be purely about digital life and the tools I use.

Except the title of the podcast is the Offline Online Podcast.

The whole point is to create my online habits to prioritise and sometimes even enhance my offline life.

The past few months, I’ve just needed to prioritise my offline life.

I also need to let go a little of the pregnancy notions of what I have with what this podcast should be, and just experiment with things.

So here I am, in my car as I wait for my kids to finish karate training, recording an update on where I want this to go moving forward. I placed a monthly cadence on this podcast, thinking that this would give me enough time to come up with a topic, record an episode without the pressure of a weekly podcast.

Turns out this was optimistic.

This doesn’t mean I want to push out the timelines.

In fact, I want to try and remove the limitations and expectations of myself altogether. The cadence is something that many podcasters point towards as their success.

Keep a schedule and ensure you deliver for your audience and be consistent.

Indeed, as a podcast listener, I know I check for new episodes on certain days for podcasts that I’m a fan of.

But I’m doing this for me.

I’m pretty confident that the extent of the audience is mostly myself anyway.

And I’m trying to push myself out of my comfort zone as someone who deals with increasing levels of anxiety.

So while Apple Podcasts may show that I list a cadence of how often I publish an episode, I want to lift the limitation for myself and just post when I have something to say.

But does that mean only a handful of podcasts a year?

Maybe, maybe not.

The other thing I want to change is my personal expectation that a podcast should be centered around a topic.

So I’m going to try and be a bit more fluid with what I cover here. Include more discussions about my life as a whole and my mental health.

To be more of an audio blog, much in the same way I have a written blog at andrewmelder.com if you’re interested, which I’ll leave a link to in the show notes.

This may mean a few shorter audio thoughts sprinkled amongst slightly longer thoughts about a topic or even a device.

Much like my written blog, this may mean periods of manic posting, followed by weeks, maybe even months of silence.

So that’s a plan.

Like with many plans, however, things are subject to change.

But I do hope if you do listen, it does bring some value.

As always, I’d love to hear from you and I’ll leave an email address to get in contact in the show notes as well.

So that’s all for now.

As always, thank you for listening.

And it’s time to get offline.

We’ll see you in the next episode.