This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
It’s quitting season
No matter how often I tell myself I can do all the creative projects I’ve committed to, the evidence contradicts me.
Perhaps if I wasn’t running a small business.
Perhaps if I didn’t have a family with two young kids.
Perhaps if I had the cognitive stamina to do more writing instead of spending just a couple of hours here and there to take a break and just I don’t know watch a TV show or read a book sometimes or something so sue me.
On paper, I can do all the things. There is time.
In reality, I burn out, and cannot fill every waking hour with work, no matter how meaningful and fulfilling.
In 2018, a friend and I started a podcast called Nerd Critic. It was just a movie podcast, of which there are approximately five hundred, but we poured our hearts and souls into it for the better part of two years before Covid came along with some ideas. For the next four years, we tried to keep it alive like a zombified loved one from a Stephen King novel.
Finally, just last week, we decided to officially let it die. It was time. Far past!
What happened was we both realized we were over-committed, half-assing everything instead of full-assing anything, and when I made a big list of all the things I was committed to, that beloved podcast that never grew its audience beyond our family and friends just could not compete with anything else on that list.
And so, we quit the show.
Deep down, I knew Nerd Critic wasn’t going to be the only thing I needed to quit. Quitting season is just getting started.
So after #100 of The Nooner, I’m going to take a step back and apply some rigor to the hard question of how to best, or at least better, allocate my time and energy.
Because while I’ve proven to myself that I can technically do all of the things I’ve committed to, I’m also coming to understand that unless I give up some of them, I won’t be able to do any of them well enough to be worth doing at all.
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