I spent a long time as a serious marathon runner. (I still see myself as one, just one on hiatus while my kid is little).
When you run a lot of marathons, you start to find comfort in the regularity of the training plan: the first few weeks are spent building up your endurance, then you add in speed work and run ever-longer long runs until you get close to race distance. The last week before your race (the “taper” week), you pull everything back to rest up before the big day. Then you run your race, and you get a glorious week or two (or three, or four) to take a break from the endless slog of training—before you inevitably sign up for another marathon and start the process over again.
Podcasting isn’t like that. Podcasting has no taper week, no big event you’re building toward, and certainly no periods of rest and relaxation. It’s relentless. There is always writing, interviewing, recording, editing, designing, publishing, and promoting to do.
If I had to train for marathons the way most people work on podcasts, I’d have stopped after one race. The demands on my time would be too high, and I’d have no promise of a break after all my hard work.
That’s one reason I think so many podcasters burn out and podfade before they’ve hit their stride. Podcasting is hard, and there’s no guarantee of relief—unless, that is, you quit.
Which is why every podcaster should have a burnout plan: A plan for what to do when you need a break so you don’t have to give it all up.
Here are three ideas for what that could look like.
(P.S. You can hear me talk about why 50% of podcasts don’t make it past episode 5, including the aforementioned relentless slog, with the hosts of In & Around Podcasting when the episode drops tomorrow, April 23).
Plan 1: Re-release your back catalog
If you’ve been podcasting for a while, there’s gold in your archives and churn in your listeners. People stop listening to podcasts all the time for all sorts of reasons, and even if your download numbers have steadily crept up over time, chances are the majority of your listeners today are different from the ones you started with. And most haven’t heard everything you’ve published.
Which is why you should feel empowered to re-release some older episodes and use that time to take a break. Record a boilerplate intro (or a custom one for each episode, you do you), and schedule out your best reruns for the time you’ll take away from the show. (Don’t forget to schedule in time to prep for your first new episode back).
When I cohosted Curiosity Daily (a daily science show, just so we know what we’re dealing with here), that’s what we would do during the holidays: We looked at the stats on all of our episodes from the year, and we re-released the most popular ones with a brief introduction letting people know they were getting a “best of” episode. And we got to spend the holidays with our families, not recording podcasts.
Plan 2: Go seasonal
I don’t know what you’ve been told, but there are no requirements for putting your podcast out in seasons. You don’t need to be a fiction show, you don’t need to be an investigative show, you don’t even need to have themed seasons—you just put out a handful of episodes, take a break, and call it season 1.
I do this with my podcast and I highly recommend it. It programs in a podcast taper period where I can actually think about the show at a high level instead of constantly looking for the next guest and episode topic.
The wildest part? My downloads barely budge from the last episode of the last season and the first episode of the next. There’s a theory out there (someone please conduct this study) that podcast subscribers rarely unsubscribe from a show they don’t see in their feed, and that feels true to my show’s analytics.
Put another way: The fear that if you stop publishing episodes, people will stop listening? It’s false.
Plan 3: Don’t do anything. Just…take a break.
Listen: If you want to quit your podcast, more power to you. It’s a skill to know when to walk away from something that isn’t serving you.
But if you don’t want to quit—if the weekly slog is just grinding you down, or life changes are making the schedule hard to stick to—you really can just take a break and not do anything else. Inform your listeners, be transparent about what’s going on, and you may be surprised at how many people support you and stick by your show when you finally bring it back.
I did this with Taboo Science. I got pregnant and immediately was hit with the reality that producing a solo podcast in my free time during the fatigue and nausea of the first trimester is really fucking hard. So I finished up the season, let my listeners know that the podcast would be back but that I didn’t know when, and that was that. My baby was six months old when I started working on the new season, and in total, the hiatus lasted roughly a year and a half.
Throughout that hiatus, people kept discovering the show, asking about it on social media, and DMing me to let me know how hopeful they were that it would come back. That feedback gave me the reinforcement I needed to know that the slog was—and would be—worth it.
The podcast slog is worth it. But you’re allowed to take a break every so often.
For the past few many summers, we've created compilations built on bits of older episodes and packaged them under one thematic umbrella. So in this way we get a break without 'interrupting' content. They've worked really well, but take a considerable amount of labour upfront. Frankly, our initial motivation was fear of losing listeners and patrons; your example of taking 5-ish months of respite seem to demonstrate our fears may have been misplaced!