My podcast lockdown
It’s so quiet that I could hear a fly buzzing somewhere upstairs in my tiny house.
I am in the middle of a farm at least 3km from the closest sign of human activity.
Now it’s just me, my microphone and an empty word document with the flickering digital space bar, challenging me to type something under de title “first 10 years podcast, episode 1”
Last week my wife left to visit her parents with my almost 2 year old son for 10 days.
And even though I missed them (a lot), I have to admit the first days were not bad: sleeping in, doing sports any time I felt, writing a new song, going out for a spontaneous beer.. all without asking for permission or having to organise any logistics.. Ok, it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
So the first thing I did: I booked my wife’s birthday present to me, a full weekend in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere in Friesland.
The goal: to finish the first episode of my podcast “the first 10 years”.
This spontaneous action made me realize something: that I had escalated to a whole new level of commitment to my side projects again.
Why?
The interaction between hobbies and the main project
I have always had many hobbies and side projects, however in the past 5 years I felt they had stagnated a bit.
In my previous article I said what it meant for my focus to clearly choose 1 main project and separate others as side projects (https://misterawesome.nl/life-after-startup-mister-all-over-the-place/).
The main thing that I was doing was clearly Funk-e, an established business that I had been running for 13 years. My hobbies were often connected to Funk-e, which gave my hobbies a major boost.
So when I learned how to use audio editing software for my music, I would apply it to voiceover editing for work, and when I learned to create a professional creative concept at work, I would apply it to writing lyrics.
This dynamic always ensured that my hobbies would grow alongside with my main focus projects.
What that also means however is that when my company became more focused and stable, somehow I became less ambitious with my hobbies.
Obviously my life also stabilized. I got married, we had a child and some of the hobbies suffered, especially music did.
But it was not the lack of time that was the culprit. It was the lack of novelty in my work.
A reshuffle of work and hobbies
After stepping back from the day to day operations of Funk-e, this kicked off a period of intense experimentation again. Armed with a renewed sense of purpose behind my side projects, I am trying one after the other new thing.
Changing this much focus has meant fundamentally reshuffling my daily routine, and meant a new perspective on my free time.
Time that previously was filled with sleep or watching a Netflix show is now put to better use.
My evenings are now filled with last minute podcast edits, early mornings are now opportunities to review a blog article, and Thursday evenings every two weeks are a moment to reshape what we do with my band after 16 years together.
Once in a while, i get to take a moment to myself, like I did last weekend. A weekend to completely immerse myself into a podcast project, that I have been wanting to kick off since 6 months.
And now, that moment is there, and this Friday, episode 1 will finally kick off on Spotify and LinkedIn.
