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I have a challenge for you this year. Complete your unfinished podcast episodes. Thank you for joining me for the Audacity to podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis. Do you have any unfinished episodes? Maybe you've already recorded them, but you haven't gotten around to editing them. Or maybe you've started writing the outline or even the script, but. But you never finished. Then this is my challenge to you this year. I'm not going to say today, this week, or this month, although that would be great if you do it. But at least this year, and I'm publishing this still near the beginning of the year. This year, I challenge you to finish those unfinished episodes. I've got a few thoughts that I hope will inspire you for this first, it's a quotation I heard long ago, if it'll keep, it'll preach. This phrase usually applies to holding up against scrutiny, and it's often used in circles for pastors and sermons and preachers and such. But the first time I heard it was when I was at an evening church service and the power went out several minutes before the preacher was about to start his sermon. We had already sung multiple psalms in the growing darkness inside of that church and the lack of sound amplification. But when it came time for the sermon, the the preacher realized the kids were too restless in the dark. The audience wouldn't be able to hear the message without the sound system, and even if the kids were perfectly quiet and he would be extremely distracted by the environment, basically preaching to utter darkness. Which, that is quite a metaphor, isn't that that's something to think about. So he decided to dismiss the service, and instead of giving that sermon, he said, if it'll keep, it'll preach. And he admitted that he had heard that phrase said by someone else before him. His application of that saying was that if that particular sermon remained on his heart after the scrutiny of time, then he would preach it again someday in the future. And he wasn't the normal pastor. So it wasn't just like he could say, hey, come Sunday or next Wednesday or something like that to hear this sermon. It was he was going to preach on that particular night in place of who would normally preach. So he said, if it'll keep, it'll preach. So what I want you to do is look at those ideas that have been burning on your mind or that you've had on a list for a while, and if they've kept under the scrutiny of time, if you're still interested in those ideas, if that script still excites you. If you still want to put that episode out, then do it. Actually finish the episode and. And publish that episode or however many episodes that you have that are still sitting there on the back burner. Try and complete those episodes. I have so many drafts in the Audacity to Podcast drafts folder, along with an ideas list. I have so many things on there I've often talked about. When I first started the Audacity to podcast, and I was in my planning Stage Back in 2010, I made a list of about 35 episodes, one of the very few times that I wrote something on paper during planning processes, because I usually like the type things out. But it was late at night. I was actually sitting in bed thinking about this because I just couldn't get the idea off my mind to start a podcast about podcasting. What a novel idea, right? And so I made a list of about 35 topics of things that I wanted to make episodes about. I knew that I wanted the Audacity to podcast to focus on pretty much one topic per episode and dive into that episode in deeper detail, but really focus everything around that one topic. So my list was a list of essentially 35 episodes that I knew I wanted to do. There are items on that list I still haven't done today after more than 400 episodes, which should be a lot longer if I hadn't had to take such a long hiatus in the years. But I've been podcasting with the Audacity to podcast more than 15 years now, and there's still items on that list that I haven't gotten to yet. And I continue to adding to the items that I haven't gotten to yet, because I think about things constantly. I'm getting ideas from random places and random inspirations, and I put them on my list. Or I start drafting an outline because it can happen at completely random times. I just think, ooh, these couple points would be really good under this point. So even before I recorded this episode, I revisited my list of ideas and I saw multiple drafts of things that I'd started preparing. And some things I decided I want to do more research on that. I want to think about that more. I want to talk to more people about this before I publish content about it. I want to prepare this more. Certain things like that. And that's when I realized, wait a minute, just that that crisis that I face with my own content is a topic in and of itself and something that you've probably faced too, at some point. And it might not be topics that you have a list of, but maybe guests that you want to have on your podcast, or movies that you want to review, or shows that you want to talk about, or products that you want to test and review or anything like that. Look at that unfinished list of things, whatever that is, that unfinished list, and try to complete those things this year. And a big step to doing that is my next point. Complete the pre production for draft episodes. If you're like me, you might have some episodes where you've actually started preparing for those episodes. It could be a guest that you want to interview and you've started reading their book, or you've started writing a list of the questions you want to ask, it's a topic that you want to teach, and you've started writing out your outline for that. Maybe it's some jokes that you want to tell and you've been trying to refine those jokes. Whatever kind of pre production it is that you need to do to get that episode done that's been sitting undone for so long, work on that pre production. That could be the planning, the preparation, the, the contacting of people. That could be scheduling issues, whatever that is, take action on those things and complete that pre production so you can actually get into that production stage of recording the episode. And then you can get into the post production, which is the publishing of the episode, after you edit it, and do whatever kind of stuff you need to or feel that you need to do with it. But look at what you have in draft form, your draft ideas, your. Your draft notes. Turn those things into episodes. I'm not saying you have to take everything and completely empty your draft folder or your collection of draft ideas. But I do challenge you this year. Try to knock off some of those things, especially the things that have kept for years, like my previous point. If it'll keep, it'll preach those things that are sitting. Maybe just because you've been thinking, I want to prepare a little bit more for this. Well, set aside the time to actually prepare for that. If you need to do more research, if you need to schedule a call with someone. I was really inspired by this at PodFest 2026 just recently and I did an episode. My previous episode, 4:17, was about some big takeaways from PodFest and something I really liked during one of their they called it influencer meet and greets. And it's a really neat thing that they have for really structured networking where you move from table to table and each time you probably have a completely different group of people at your tables. Sometimes you might have One or two people that are the same, but the questions are different each time. When you get to a different table and the conversation is led by someone, there's a timekeeper and all of this. So everything moves along very smoothly. But one of the things that they said is don't leave this room without an appointment with someone. Don't just say, let's follow up, but actually make an appointment with someone. And I met a really nice young gentleman who does some podcast editing and it turns out he's the son of one of the staff and he helps out also with podfest and he has an editing service and I have a product, Pod Chapters. Well, two products, Pod Chapters and podgagement, that could be useful for podcast editors and service providers, especially Pod Chapters. Boy, if you are editing episodes for other people, Pod Chapters could be the perfect thing for you. In fact, there are several features in Pod Chapters designed specifically for editing multiple separate podcasts. Not just episodes, but separate podcasts. Like you can have saved templates that even automatically apply based on a file name pattern. Whenever you upload that file name for adding the chapters and the transcript to it, then it can automatically apply these presets to your episode. So it saves you time, speeds up your workflow, plus everything else that podchapters does. Check it out. Podchapters. Com. I didn't mean to make this into a commercial for Pod Chapters, but I did want to speak with this gentleman about Pod Chapters and podgagement because I thought this could be a great service that he could offer for his clients and not just something like, hey, buy my product so I can make more money and you make less money. No, what I wanted to do and the selling point for it was I said this could be something that could be an extra value for your clients. So if you have clients starting to think, I'm not sure if I'm getting enough value, maybe you add this onto it or maybe you need to increase their price and this is something that you can include with that. So they wouldn't just be saying, hey, we're increasing your price for our same services. But they could say, we need to increase your pricing and we're now adding these extra services included in the new price for you. That helps to justify certain price increases and such. So had this great conversation with him, very short conversation, and I realized this is someone I need to make an appointment with. So we looked at our calendars and we scheduled it and we had that follow up call and he was very excited about what podgagement and Pod Chapters could do for him and his company and his clients editing for podcasters. And that came from not just a hey, let's follow up sometime. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't really happen unless you're really good at following up. It was really good, as I've heard from SaaS Academy that I was a member of for a little while. Book a meeting from a meeting. Bam fam is what they said. Book a meeting from a meeting. Bam fam. B A M F A M. Try to do that with your own podcast or with whatever it is that you're trying to do right now instead of just reaching out saying, hey, can we try and find a time? Say I would love to schedule an interview with you. Here are some times available. Please pick one. Or here's my booking link. Let's pick a time for next week or are you available next week on this day? Give me some times that might work for you. Whatever your system is for scheduling, try and make it easy on your guest or whatever it is that you need to do to finish that pre production for your drafts so that you can move those drafts into ready to publish and then eventually published next once you've recorded those episodes. Move them from drafts. Now you've recorded them. Or maybe you've got several episodes like this where they have already been recorded, but you've not done anything with them yet. And it's not just because you like to batch record and then batch process. But these might be episodes that have been sitting around for a while. Maybe there's a little bit of an inferiority complex or imposter syndrome where you might feel like this episode wasn't very good. I'm not saying you have to publish bad episodes, although there could be a place to do that, actually. You could even say, and your audience might enjoy this. You could say, maybe you've been podcasting for five years, 10 years. Whatever it is, you could say, you know what I found? I found an old episode that I recorded five years ago and my voice sounds completely different, my production style was different, I wasn't as confident, but I thought there's still some value in this. And so I want to share this with you. Even though you've never heard this before, and I did this a long time ago, I think we could still benefit from what was shared in this episode. And you know what? I'm guilty of this years ago. Oh my. It's probably been 10 years ago at this point. I interviewed, Yes, I actually interviewed someone for the audiosity to podcast, which I haven't published an interview in I don't know how many years because it's just not my thing to do. Which is kind of obvious because this interview I recorded with Chris Brogan, I think more than 10 years ago. Yes, more than 10 years ago. I still haven't published it. And it's a very interesting conversation. And the reason I never published it back then was I just didn't want to edit an interview. And interviews don't really excite me. So I wasn't all that excited about it. So if you're in this place where you have recorded, then consider whatever that step is that you need to do to finish the editing. Do that. Or maybe even consider publishing it with very minimal editing. You could do some bookend editing where you say something at the beginning to introduce the episode. Like I mentioned earlier, that you can let people know this was a very old episode I never got around to publishing, but I thought you might enjoy hearing it. And then you say something at the very end. Maybe you even end up laughing at yourself. Maybe you interrupt yourself along the way, like it's an episode where you shared old advice. And so you come in. I hear Dave Jackson do this with some of his interviews or topics that he discusses, where he will interject with extra thoughts and extra information. You could do that with your own content, even if it's you monologuing. You could pop in every now and then and say, and you could have a little transition sound or something like that, say future me here or any. Whatever you decide is best for you in that case. But then you could say, I no longer recommend this, or I discovered that didn't work, or now I've discovered how much better this works and this led to this great success, or anything like that. So you can build on the content that you hadn't released, or you could publish it with minimal editing. It's really up to you. The big thing is, please don't feel like just because you've recorded it, you have to publish it. But if you've recorded it and you haven't deleted it, then maybe there's still something there that's worth publishing. Consider that. Maybe try publishing it this year, and maybe he will finally this year hear the Chris Brogan interview. And in fact, I am going to say something to my editor, John Buchinnest, right now, and you're going to get to be a witness to that, to hold me accountable. John, please remind me to send you my recorded interview with Chris Brogan, so that I could finally publish that. Thanks Next, discard what no longer sparks joy. This comes from the book the Life Changing Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondu. She said the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one's hand and ask, does this spark joy? If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest, but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge. And that's from Marie Kondu in the Life Changing Magic of Tidying up, which is a book I have not read. But I've heard this quotation and so I found it quoted it for this because it is relevant. Look at those ideas that you've had, whether they are simple topics, whether they're unfinished episodes. Maybe they are completely recorded episodes that you just haven't gotten around to publishing, but you just don't feel like publishing. Well, look at that stuff. And in a sense, think about does this episode still spark joy? Am I still interested in this topic that I wanted to do an episode about? Is this guest, this movie, this book, this resource, this whatever it was, do I still care about it? Do I still want to share this with my audience? Even if you care about it or care about that person, is it still something that you want to share with your audience? Does it still spark joy? To quote Marie Kondu, if not, then maybe discard it. I'm not saying delete it permanently because you might still change your mind in the future, but at least discard it from your list and clean up your list so that you can know. Eh, I don't really want to talk about that anymore. So discard those concepts, those episode drafts, those ideas, those unpublished episodes that you're just not really interested in anymore. Especially if it's something you haven't recorded yet and you try to record an episode about something that you're not passionate about that's going to come through in your voice in the podcast. Yes, you can drum up some enthusiasm for some things and there are some places to do that. The whole fake it till you make it kind of thing, which isn't necessarily about faking it, but it's more about forcing yourself to. To take action to get some momentum going. Or like I like to refer to it as bathtub theology or bathtub philosophy. It was when I was a kid. I hated taking baths until I got in the bathtub and then you couldn't get me out of the bathtub because I loved taking baths. I just didn't remember. I loved taking baths until I actually got in and started playing with all the bubbles. Then I loved the bathtub. And that could be it for you with some of these topics that you might feel like, ugh, I don't really want to talk about it. Well, see if you can try. See if you can spark that joy while forcing yourself to work on it. And that's a good self discipline as well to exercise your drive and motivation, your determination, your thoroughness to work on it anyway and get that spark of joy through it. This is something I sometimes face. I'm an ambivert, which means I'm in the middle of introvert and extrovert. On my lazy days, I'll be an introvert. And if I go to a conference or a social gathering, I might initially feel lazy and feel like I don't really want to go try to meet people. I have to make an intentional decision in my mind and kind of like flip a switch to go meet people and decide, nope, I'm not going to just hang out with the people I know. Or maybe I will for a few minutes just to kind of rev up. But I'm going to go meet someone. I'm going to find someone who looks like they need someone to talk to and they're not busy or find a conversation I can join in on. And you might see me do that at conferences too. You'll see me come into a room, kind of look around, maybe connect first with the people I know and then start moving around and talking to other people and meeting people and widening the circle of conversation as someone else comes up. And then it's like, hey, how about you come on and join our conversation over here? So sometimes it does just take you that extra energy just to get a little bit of momentum going. And I've mentioned this in the past, you can't even use AI for this. This is one of my first uses of AI or LLMs, large language models. Before ChatGPT was even a thing, I was talking about Jasper, where back then it was called Jarvis and Conversion AI. It's a tool that's not so popular anymore. And it. I don't know if it really exists in the way that I used to use it. I now recommend MAGI instead. Magi is a super toolbox of AI things. You get GPT, you get Claude and Gemini, and a bunch of image and video editors and AI tools all in one subscription. So it's a great value if you like AI tools. But I don't recommend using AI to create your content. It can, however, help you get some momentum. You can ask it to give you ideas of what to talk about, or to at least give you an intro paragraph about a particular topic that you're struggling to just get started on. And there have been many times in the past when I first started using what's now called Jasper, if it even still exists the way I used it. But when I started using AI back then, there were many times that I tried it to just start something that I needed to write, and it gave me a sentence or two and then I wrote pages of content because I just needed that little push to get started. And then the joy started sparking in me and I got excited about it and I got the momentum going and I started going with it. You could do the same thing with your episodes. Might feel a little bit hard at first to get some of those draft ideas moving down the pipeline of your production workflow, whatever that looks like to you. But try it. See if once you get into it, it then sparks some joy. And if it doesn't spark that joy for you, if you don't feel like it's something you want to talk about at all anymore, feel free to remove it from your list then. Before I go, I want to give a special thanks to Joshua Liston for sending $5 and saying a little help for someone helping Indie podcasters. Thank you so much Joshua, and also $25 from Leslie Martin saying, if you ever get to Anchorage, Alaska, give me a shout. I'd love to meet with you and take you out to dinner. Well, thank you so much, Leslie. I'd love to visit Alaska someday. There are a lot of places I'd love to visit someday that I know would spark joy. It's just a matter of actually getting there and the logistics of such. But thank you so much for those kind donations. These have come in from the past couple of months and I just never got around to thanking them publicly for them. If you value what I share with you in the Audacity podcast, would you consider what that's worth to you and give back whatever you feel it's worth to you? You can do that@theaudacitytopodcast.com giveback or if you want to buy one of my products, the big things I have right now are podgagement and pod chapters. You can go to podchapters.com to help you add engaging chapters to your podcast Within Seconds, or Podgage Engagement.com to help you supercharge your audience interaction and engagement. Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools. It's time for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from the audacitytopodcast.com thanks for listening.