When this conversation was recorded, Gabrielle Pitman was a songwriter four seasons into a podcast, and had burned out on it. Between the third and fourth seasons, Pitman stopped for about twelve months, and by Pitman’s account the audience stayed. Whatever all that momentum had been protecting, it was not the listeners.

Talking with Craig Constantine, who hosts this show, Pitman describes what making something needs:

“When you are creating something from nothing, there is a certain amount of spaciousness in your mind, in your emotions, in your physical, mental space. You need to have that kind of openness, that emptiness, in order for ideation to occur.”

Against that emptiness Pitman sets the “pressure of publish daily, three times a day, weekly, whatever the best practices.” Momentum, once built, “starts to self-sustain”: “the next interview, the next episode, the next whatever that you have to publish, and you’re basically on this hamster wheel.”

Constantine has been on that wheel, and has a name for it: “the delusion of momentum,” the reef on which “I basically smashed the ship.” His early episodes went out whenever they were ready. Then he gave a team member one job, “get us on a schedule,” and it changed how the work was done. Looking back, what he had wanted was more conversations, not episodes on particular days of the week. As he puts it, “Nobody cares that episode 7 came out on a Wednesday in 2018.”

“They really don’t,” Pitman says. “Only the algorithm cares. It’s the only thing keeping track of it.”

So a schedule is kept for an audience that, by both their accounts, is not keeping it. The one party counting the Wednesdays is the algorithm. And the schedule is not free. It is paid for in the emptiness Pitman described, the room ideas need.

The year off tested this, though not comfortably. Pitman spent much of it “beating myself up for that break,” over one idea: “if I don’t feed the momentum, it’s going to stall out.” It did not. “I didn’t lose any audience,” Pitman says. “It persisted.”

What the year gave back was the emptiness. Pitman describes the demons that kept asking “Why are you sitting on the couch?” and the answer Pitman came to: “I needed that time to do nothing, to have that spaciousness to ideate again.” That time was for starting the songs that had been pushed aside, and for going back over old interviews:

“Actually, that person two seasons ago had a really good point, and I don’t think I sat with it enough.”

Nothing about that point was missing. It had been in Pitman’s own conversations for two seasons. What it lacked was time to be taken in. A schedule has a slot for the next interview. It has no slot for sitting with the last one.

Pitman’s conclusion, after twelve months of wrestling with it, is that the pace is “up to the creator and their life,” set by the seasons of that life rather than by a best practice. If the algorithm is the only one keeping your calendar, the question is what the calendar is spending, and whether there is a guest two seasons back you have not yet sat with.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Opportunity with Gabrielle Pitman,” published August 29, 2022.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.