If you're anything like me, podcasting over the holidays is full of challenges: extended travel, family commitments, and the routines that carried you through the year are in flames for two weeks.
If you followed our suggestions, the recording day that you locked in might fall on Christmas and New Year's Eve. That streak that you've so carefully protected all year slips in the one month where everything is chaos.
People who podfade in January aren't quitters; they're just people who lost the thread over the holidays and haven't been able to pick it back up.
If you set it up correctly in November and early December, you can coast through December and into January after everything has stabilized.
The problem: the holidays break the routine that kept you consistent
If you're anything like us, your consistency runs on a routine, and the holidays are the antithesis of routine. You're the same creator, but your scaffolding is falling apart.
The two weeks around Christmas and New Year's make it easy to create a gap, which causes a strong year to end quietly. Not with a decision but with a drift.
Build a holiday podcast buffer in November
Our goal in this article is to give you a system that you can use in November so that December publishes itself even if you fall offline because of the holidays. It's a very simple process: you're going to bank episodes now and release them on a schedule.
It works because you're going to trade a very heavy November for a free December. This will allow you to front-load a bunch of your work while you still are in the mode of your routine that you've spent so much of the Year cultivating.
How to keep publishing over the holidays
Batch two or three episodes before December hits
Our first suggestion is to batch record two or three episodes before December even hits. You can do this in one recording session in November that will help cover the weeks that you'll be away. We've talked about this in our post about batch recording.
Run a lighter format for the season
Because it's December, people are already kind of looking for a lighter fare, so you can do something like a short solo reflection, a year in review, or listener questions. It's all content that has a lower lift but is still content you can publish easily.
Or take a planned hiatus, done right
I'm also going to give you permission (not that you need it) to just take a planned hiatus. You can stop on purpose and let everybody know that you're going to return on a specific date; that way, you've chosen a break.
Set the January restart trigger before you log off
Finally, decide what your first January episode and recording day will be. Future you will love this because you won't have to come back from your vacation in that post-holiday fog trying to remember where you left off and what you were going to do.
What this means for staying consistent
We like to think of December as a stress test for your show. If you have a show that survives the holiday on an episode buffer, it's going to survive most things.
Interruptions like the holidays are always going to come up, and you don't want them to cause podfade. Creating a plan for December will help you prevent that.
If you do your best to protect that December-to-January handoff, you are going to keep your whole Year's momentum instead of restarting from zero in January.
Want More?
If you found this and you're looking for better systems and processes. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter or our Substack (or both) and let us know what systems you've implemented. If you want some more support, Unleashed Podcasts gives you tools to track your December plan in an integrated package.
This is Scott Keck-Warren, and you've been listening to The Steady Pack. Choose progress over perfection, and I'll see you next week.
