How long should a podcast be?
If you Google this question, you’ll get approximately 282,000 results (or at least, I did). Luckily, Google pulls an answer from an article on page 1 and places it in a box on the top. Apparently, if you want to do a daily show, episodes should be 10-15 minutes; a weekly show, 60 minutes; a monthly show, 90.
But if you don’t trust that answer or source, you can keep reading the search results. There, you’ll find one article that says, “The average episode length is 43 minutes.” Another just outright says to create 20-minute episodes. Still others shrug and wave their hands to avoid answering it outright. (They might be onto something…)
Maybe Google isn’t so helpful here. No problem, you can tweet it. If others choose to engage, as they did with my tweet recently, you might end up in an even worse place than on Google. (I certainly did.) I got 69 different people saying 69 different things, each of them tied to some other condition, like genre or episode format.
The best response? A guy by the name of Tyler Lavoie. I don’t know Tyler, but our exchange went like this:
“How long should a podcast be?”
“Seven.”
…Tyler wins the internet.
Twitter proved more overwhelming than Google. How about the Apple Podcast charts? I checked the business category, where I sit, and looked at the top shows listed. They’re all over the place in terms of episode length.
So now, we have dozens and dozens of possibilities, pulled from three sources, which took two minutes to find — for one tiny decision we need to make as part of a larger project. How long should a podcast be?
So how long should a podcast be? The answer, of course, is “It depends.”
It depends on a lot of factors. But it mostly depends … on you. The details of your unique context hold vital clues you can use to make a better decision than anyone else could possibly share with you. Unfortunately, we don’t often spend time looking hard at our own context, and so, when faced with infinite ideas, we retreat to the average. We end up making the conventional decision, which done often enough yields commodity work.
Today, we’re all living through the dark side of the information age: advice overload. But great work doesn’t come from the answers others give us. It comes from the questions we ask ourselves. In this era of infinite answers, the best skill we can develop is to ask better questions — to vet all those possibilities, when everyone else would merely do the easy thing: retreat to the average.
And look, sometimes, we don’t want to think critically about a decision. Sometimes, it’s smart just to pick the microphone everyone is telling you to pick for your podcast — because you’re not in the business of microphone technology. You’re in the business of finding and sharing your voice. You’re in the business of making a difference in your career, your company, and in the lives of those you aim to serve. You’re in the business of shifting the culture for the better. And for that stuff — the important stuff — we can’t just default to the average advice. We need a better system than the way we pick a microphone.
We’re taught at a young age that there’s a “right” and “wrong” answer for nearly everything. Today, we face infinite “right” answers, and our reaction is to pick the safe one, the easy one, the familiar one — then hope it’s also the best one.
Remember: Finding best practices isn’t the goal. Finding the best approach for YOU is. And how do we do that? We make the decision to raise our hands and lead. We ask the tougher questions. Rather than telling others we “have” the answer, we freely admit, “I don’t have the answer. But I know how to figure it out.”
Stop acting like experts. Start acting like investigators.
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