Every week I have slightly different challenges putting together the podcast. This week I was inundated with new material for a change (50 songs on the final spreadsheet!). The wealth of new material certainly made the process of sifting through it all to find more burdensome, but it was a quite enjoyable problem to solve. The biggest challenge, however, was deciding how to organize all the songs into a coherent format that flowed. I didn't have much time early in the week to experiment with just jamming songs together like I did last week. I knew I wanted to start with the Arty remix of Lauren Aquilina's "Ocean", but that was all that I knew for several days.
The paradigm I ultimately decided on for this week's episode was "a day in the life". I mapped the songs I had culled down into a rough outline of how I felt on a typical work day: morning workout, driving to work, morning chaos, midday break, afternoon chaos, drive home, evening with the family, and time for reflection. Once that idea occurred to me the ordering fell out in maybe twenty minutes.
A powerful realization I had this week was the ability this podcast process has on improving my mood. I started listening to new podcasts last Friday and found that dramatically improved my mood for the rest of the work day. I also realized this week that I look forward to Mondays instead of dreading them like my coworkers do, since Monday is my first chance to listen to my favorite podcasts. There is also that first moment of starting a new song spreadsheet for the week. It's the moment of having to begin the task of assembling a whole new podcast again in just 7 days, largely from scratch. It's the moment that I figured I would fear and become panicked by when I first started this process, but it has instead become the moment in the week in which I feel the most free, empowered, and optimistic.
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