Time's Yours

In the end, it all comes down to time.

It's about how much time people have to listen. It's about how much time you have to give them what they want. It's about other things competing for everyone's time. It's also about how much time you have left, but we'll get to that soon enough.

As someone who's about to have a lot more time on his hands, I've been thinking about how I'll be allocating my waking hours, besides the job search. Radio listening? Podcasts? TV? Streaming? Reading? Social Media? Cat videos? Working out? Aimlessly wandering around the Internet reading random stuff? Aimlessly wandering around town, arousing suspicion? The possibilities are endless, and that's been a major issue for audio content moving forward.

We've always talked about how your competition, if you're doing radio or podcasting, isn't just other radio or podcasters, it's everything that can occupy one's time. Sure, there's multitasking, which is a plus for audio -- you can do other things while listening -- but there's a limit to that, and if you're foreground content like talk radio or podcasts, it doesn't work well. You can't really pay attention very well to spoken word content (or spots therein) if your concentration is split. (Let's not talk about listening while driving right now, okay?) Meanwhile, there are so many other things to do in a day, so radio and podcasts have to wait in an ever-increasing queue for everyone's attention.

For radio hosts, podcast hosts, and producers, then, the question becomes whether what you're doing is worthy of listeners' times and whether they'll move you to the front of the line. You might not be the best judge of that, but try to remove your biases from the evaluation and ask yourself, "would I choose listening to this over Netflix, or cooking, or playing pickleball?" Are you doing something interesting and entertaining enough to rise above the nearly infinite competing options? Because that's always been the bar, and it's getting higher. Worse, we know that listeners don't give you a lot of time to convince them to give you their time; grab them in your opening seconds, or the first few seconds they tune in, or you're toast. You have to always be on your game.

For listeners, it's the same question, and it's also a matter of fitting everything in even if that content IS what they want. Throughout my adult life, radio occupied a spot in my daily routine, whether it was listening while driving (not talking about that!) or while working or running. When podcasts came along, they took some of that time. And in the past few years, with more work responsibilities, a cross-country move, and other issues, my time spent listening has been shrinking. I just don't have the time for it, and when I do have time, I have other things that are higher up on the priority list.

So... tell me a great story. Put on a show. I have some time coming up and I gotta tell you, I'm looking forward to catching up on a lot of reading, hitting the gym, arousing suspicion around town. For the first time since high school, I'll have no immediate stake in the game. I'll just be a potential listener. My time can be your time. Show me what you got.

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You'll get material to stand out at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page. Click here for that, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item. Gonna keep that going until we're through here, so keep checking.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well, and that'll work for Threads as well. And I'm on Mastodon at @pmsimon@c.im.

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Two more of these coming up, at least here and in this form. Might be posting some stuff at pmsimon.com, if I feel like it, so let's get that thing going again. And if you need to get in touch with me going forward, besides social media, perry@pmsimon.com will work.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor (until August 15th, that is)
AllAccess.com
perry@pmsimon.com
Twitter @pmsimon
Instagram (and Threads) @pmsimon
Mastodon @pmsimon@c.im