Podcasting Burned Me Out

I’d been planning for over a year to launch a new political discussion podcast. I created the artwork and website. I brought on cohosts and mapped out the first 10 episodes. I started social media accounts and gained a thousand followers without any content.

And then I never launched the podcast.

Many factors went into the decision not to launch, but the biggest factor was burnout: the pressure to prepare, listen to other political podcasts, and stay up to date; the pressure to be “on” and interesting while recording; the pressure to find time to record and edit the podcast; and the pressure of a possible backlash over my views, whether they were too liberal, or not liberal enough, or most likely both.

Before all this, I even became burned out on my weekly podcast BitRate, a podcast about podcast culture, where I missed out on two big name interviews and asked for two hiatuses. Other life events such as moving, addiction, divorce, and bills also factored in, but instead of the podcast being my outlet, which it had been previously, it became a source of stress.

I love podcasting, so don’t get me wrong, I just couldn’t figure out how to not be overwhelmed by it. Anne Helen Petersen’s Buzzfeed article on millennial burnout resonated with me, so I talked to Mark Steadman, my BitRate cohost, about doing a limited series on how podcasting affects burnout. We decided to have some guests help us figure out some solutions to hopefully prevent our own overwhelm and the listeners’.

BitRate is a podcast for podcasters and podcast lovers. The idea is to help podcasters make better podcasts through analysis of existing podcasts and news events in the podcasting world, and illustrate to listeners what it really takes to make a great podcast.

In the Burnout series of BitRate, we talked to the creator of award-winning podcast Sleep With Me, Drew Ackerman, Dan Misener from the producing powerhouse from Pacific Content, Jenna Spinelle from The McCourtney Institute for Democracy, writer Yuvi Zalkow, and podcast consultant Mathew Passy.

So now, BitRate is over, and the political podcast is done before it started; what’s next? I’m going to take the lessons from this series (have a compelling reason to make a podcast instead of any other medium, make test episodes and try out the format, give it time and work at it with consistency, engage with listeners on a real level instead of just tweeting into the void, and set the expectations about how much and how often content will come out, for my audience and for myself) and make a new podcast! Probably. I tend to do that.

All seven episodes are live now, and you can see it all at bitratepod.com/burnout.

Has podcasting, or listening to podcasts, burned you out? Tell me about it. I’m @thepodplaylist on Twitter.