Where I Have Been

Over the last month or so, at the end of Connected, Stephen has been asking me why I haven’t been publishing anything to my blog. It’s a good question, and I thought I would answer it.

The short answer is that I am really busy right now and am prioritising the work I need to get done. But I figure I can expand on that.

It feels like the Kickstarter campaign for Designed in California closed a long time ago, but that’s not really true. It’s only been about six weeks since we were funded, and since that time we’ve been working really hard to get this project underway.

We always knew this project would take a lot of work to produce — which is why we wanted to go the route of crowdfunding it in the first place. But as we have been producing the first full series, we are learning all the steps we need to complete, while also learning that we’re doing some of them in the wrong order.

This has actually been really helpful, because we’re able to produce this series without a strict deadline for releasing it, while learning all of the steps we need to complete along the way. There is an element of creating this series a little inside-out, which is helping us learn how to be more efficient going forward.

Now, I say we have no deadline, which is true to a point. Obviously we have the deadline of the Kickstarter delivery — and we always planned to beat that — but we also have a self-imposed deadline for when we think the right time would be to release the show. And we are getting very close to that!

Progress is being made daily. Today I completed my final (hopefully!!!!!) content edit on the last episode in our first series. There are still a lot of pieces to complete (audio mixing, bouncing the files, getting the publishing system all set, finalising the launch plans, etc.), but this was a big milestone. So we hope to be able to announce the launch date of Designed in California very soon.

But we’re not just producing the content. We are also doing a lot of work laying the groundwork for the show — a show that is bigger in scope than a usual podcast for us, and that we are trying to push further than we had originally imagined. So there’s a lot of extra work going into this right now that will not be part of the ongoing workload.

To put this into perspective, below is an image of my time tracking data since the Kickstarter ended. This shows the breakdown of all the podcast-focused work I am doing, which is tagged by show for either Prep, Admin, Recording, or Editing. As you can see, Designed in California is taking up a lot of my time right now, and this was time that I have had to find from somewhere.

I would like to be very clear that this is not a complaint! I had a feeling things would be like this and have planned my life to make it work. I also know that the way things are right now is not indicative of how they will be in the future. There’s a lot of Kickstarter admin in these stats that will reduce over time, and the same goes for a lot of the meetings and calls I am having.

I won’t be spending any time assessing the long-term impact of the show on my work time for a while, until we’re much more settled into our usual rhythm. I will then be able to assess what changes I may need to make.

So that’s where I have been! I cannot wait for you to hear our first series when it launches soon — we’re talking weeks away at this point. I am so proud of what we’re building, and I think you’re going to love it.