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Run it back, run it back, run it back.
Good morning, good evening, good night, good afternoon.
Whatever time you're listening in, wherever you're listening from.
Shout out to my Spotify listenership, Apple and Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and YouTube if you're watching in.
Thanks for giving me a reason to get dressed.
Coming live from my voice to your phone, headphones, TV, or car stereo.
Your attention could have been anywhere in the world, but it's here right now.
Take a moment to be present and recognize that it is now, right now.
Whether you're right now is running, working, cleaning, exercising, flying, laying down,
driving, be grateful we're alive.
Failure can be frightening.
However, as Winston Churchill reminds us, success is all about going from failure to
failure without losing enthusiasm.
This is I Will Not Lose Podcast.
We set out to learn.
Everything is perseverance.
Everything's about learning from failure and recognize it as one step closer to success.
I'm your host, Tony Ortiz.
let's jump right in. This week we're diving into a topic that's close to my heart and one that I
suspect many of you guys have grappled with, but this is the battle between creating quality
content, the pull of digital distractions, and the ever-lurking monster of procrastination.
So I'm sitting there, I enjoyed Father's Day weekend, we're recording on Juneteenth, so
big holiday weekend lots of barbecues lots of things like that going on and so i said i'm not
going to record on sunday i'm going to enjoy father's day and um that got me to procrastinating
but it was well worth it and i'm sitting just a few hours ago uh this episode is due to drop
three hours from now so really procrastinated and i'm scrolling through facebook into that black
hole and i hit a moment of realization like the answers to what i'm going to talk about tonight
are not going to be found in the endless feed but within my own experiences and struggles
so i like to kind of go with whatever's on my mind at the time and procrastination really hit so
uh it's really a struggle in this digital age because you have the pull of social media the
demand for consistent content, it's like a ticking clock, you know, it's like a balancing act. So
do you share, do you post, do you work on creating a quality post? You just post something with the
dog, taking the dog for a walk, you know? Um, and then finding yourself scrolling and looking
through other people's content, you know, uh, it's really can be a time sink. Like it really
can be a time sink. I've had experience from taking a complete wash out from social media
and just walking away from it completely, as well as being active and having something to promote.
So I had to take a step back. And, you know, whenever you feel the pull of, wow, I got to
drop something and you don't know whether or not it's going to be the greatest thing you ever
created because, you know, they say the greatest inspiration is a deadline, but sometimes it can
cause stress. And at least when you see people podcasting, they appear very relaxed. And even
if you have a production company taking care of everything for you, you know, it seems like just
talking. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what it is. It's talking. But there's a lot of
back end that goes into it. There's a lot of preparing for the episode topic. There's a lot
of formulating how the flow of that episode is going to go. And so it really does take a lot of
time. It's not really something you can just whip together right beforehand. So I was going to post
late, but I think we're in a good frame. I realized that I got into podcasting to relax, to kind of
set a personal anecdote. And it became something that I'm writing the script as I go. You know,
we listen to viewers and we listen to stuff, but the biggest and greatest feedback is the personal
anecdotes. And that's what sets this podcast apart from the hundreds of thousands of other
positive mentality podcasts that are out there. I mean, I don't even know what I'd be categorized
as. But the truth is, is you're going to deal with procrastination. You're going to deal with
some days where you're like, man, I just don't want to get up and go through and do that.
So having to remind myself why I got into it was pretty good. But join me. I'll continue with the
personal stories, lessons learned, and strategies developed along the way. So first thing is to
identify distractions. So like I said, a few hours ago, I was just endlessly scrolling and I don't
even know how long, but I found myself just aimlessly scrolling through Facebook and I saw
somebody else had posted their podcast. I said, oh, that's right. I got to drop tonight, you know?
Um, and the fact that I don't even know how much time I put into sitting there scrolling,
it's, it's kind of scary.
So you have to realize what is a distraction?
What is the normal promotion and the stuff that you have to do?
Cause you can't, your stuff can't just sit in a box.
I mean, I've tried to go a long time without posting anything and people tend to forget
or they ask you, are you still doing that?
Hell, even if you are posting what you're doing, people still ask you if you're still
doing it.
It's, it's strange how real we think Facebook and social media is, but the algorithm really
creates an echo chamber.
Like you don't see absolutely everything your friends are doing.
They don't see everything you're doing.
So understand the impact, understand how the pressure to release content or release an
episode every week can be a struggle between like, you know, some people are smart and
they have months worth of content planned out, ready to go.
they have an idea of what they're shooting. And I could imagine that at some point you want to
create something fresh during that time that something comes out. So it's great to have a
hybrid schedule of a whole bunch of stuff set up and be able to drop consistently without putting
a ton of effort and putting yourself of what if I don't have something to come up with this week,
what am I going to be able to do? So I I struggled with the high quality content versus meeting the
deadline versus how do you go and promote the episodes? You know, I took a break from promoting
the episodes, focused on some other things and just made sure I hit my drop date every week
and the drop in my viewership. I definitely felt it. So people do need to be reminded,
even if they're subscribed to you, people need to see what's going on. So it's a very real struggle
between do I have to be online? Are people going to forget what I do? I can honestly say in about
12 years of business, very few, and I'm absolutely grateful for all my clients that did come through
Facebook, but very rarely is it a referral where somebody reaches out to you and you build a huge
relationship of somebody through Facebook. So I know the realities. I know what's there.
I know that there's a whole market for people who just want to see the short stories and the content.
So you find, you know, I originally created a long form podcast and now you have to find ways
to chop that down into little 30 second or 60 second bits. And people won't go back and listen
to the full episode, but they'll still feel like they kind of get a gist of what you're saying. So
i understand the game that i'm playing and i will get better at it you know so some strategies for
overcoming procrastination um i am honestly thinking and you guys let me know in the
comments what you think about it but switching to a bi-weekly format to maintain quality where
i would still be recording every week i would not get into the see it's so seductive to try
to fall into just recording every two weeks, but I'm just not going to see the sort of growth that
I want to see being that inconsistent. So if I switch to every two weeks, I would use the other
week to continue to record content as well as promote the previous week. So it doesn't have
people feel like it's in such a rush to listen to the content before next week's episode comes out
or feel that they can't go back and listen to content from there.
So, you know, set your goals, set your boundaries,
know what you can do to avoid burnout, know how much you can do.
And this comes at different times in your life.
I mean, I could definitely put a lot more energy in my 20s
when my kids were younger into doing things than I can at 36 years old.
You know, that's just the truth of things.
You deal with lacking energy at that point, but you don't want to fall into the procrastination
trap.
The worst thing you could do is have a deadline that's at the deadline and push everything
right till the end of it.
You know, there's a whole series, there's a whole thought called the Eisenhower matrix
that lets you shift things between whether or not like what the priority is as well as
the urgency.
So how fast is it due and how important is it to your overall goals?
And if you have any of those AI tools that kind of go through and organize your calendar for you, they ask you the same thing.
How long is this going to take you?
How urgent is this?
So don't fall into the trap of trying to let everything become urgent and important and be stuck in that quadrant because you're just going to drown.
It's a terrible feeling, you know.
So this is me learning from failures as well, too.
You know, I spend you talk about recognizing social media as a distraction.
YouTube is a social media as well, too.
And it's a whole game and it's a whole algorithm.
And if you're looking at your viewership and looking at your how long people listen to
your episodes and things like that, you may want to make some changes based on that.
But I got myself playing the game of YouTube for a gaming channel, and I was spending more
hours than I put into the podcast a week of putting together a highly produced video every
week. And it was getting barely any views. And I continued to do that for months. And I'm glad I
did because I learned things about video editing. There's, you know, when I didn't have clients,
I was able to work on my own stuff and get closer to that 10,000 hours. But it was really something
that distracted me from something that I could have been doing or something that's going to be
living on forever. I mean, those videos are still up, but they're not highly viewed. They're not
the greatest. So I, here's, you know, maybe, I don't know if it was four or five months of my
life that I just put towards creating that, but Hey, no, no regrets. You got to learn from your
failures. You got to move on, you know, so didn't pan out as expected, but created such valuable
experience that i know how to upload and create a channel and maintain a channel on youtube so
this i will not lose podcast can exist on spotify and all the audio platforms but also on youtube
if you guys like uh watching me talk or watching guests i think it's especially important for guest
episodes we have a few of those coming up as well but it's weird i'm gonna switch perseverance and
say one thing that helped me persevere through social media was just taking a complete break
from it um like march maybe around february or march of 2021 maybe it's 2022 i don't even remember
but i just made a post saying you know i'm enjoying taking my dog for a walk focusing on
my mental health and facebook isn't leading towards those goals i'm not really finding
anything there. So I was going to take a break from it. I was right around when Musk bought
Twitter. So I don't know if that was last year or the year before. Been so busy, time has really
been flying. But so it definitely had an impact on my algorithm. There's traffic that I'm working
on building back now that probably had I been posting consistently for six months, I would
have had an audience to promote the podcast. Now I'm kind of, oh, hey, who's this guy? You know,
people remember me. It's not a huge impact, but the amount of things I was able to create during
those six months were worth promoting. You know, we started the podcast during that time. We
incorporated Tony Ortiz, the designer LLC, got a lot of things done and set up. So now coming back
on social media, it's a lot easier not to get sucked into looking at what everybody else is
doing and using that as a measuring stick to my own success, as my own worth. That's not what you
want to get caught into. It's not that I'm anti-social media, but right around 2016 with
Snapchat and things like this, people got into kind of just posting content that wasn't curated,
like filters and things like that came later to make your pictures look better your video your
skin looks smoother but for the most part it was just people talking into their cameras
and so during that time i took a lot of pictures i have them saved as hard drive on hard drives
and i just haven't edited yet but i like to crop photos i like to color them i like to really do
photo editing so sometimes i don't want to look back at a memory i wonder you know will our kids
look back at digital photos and the way that we look back at photo albums and you know those
weren't the greatest photos but they were tactile like you could hold them they meant a whole lot so
I mean I don't it's very easy not to get stuck into procrastination or feeling like you have
to post everything that you do feeling like you have to document your entire life there still is
room for being able to talk to people in real life go to real life networking things be out
you know there's a world that exists beyond digital media but i can feel myself rambling
we're going to start to land the plane soon let's see announcements got a couple of guests coming up
i just got through editing heidi markow's episode so i'm going to touch base with her and sync when
her new website goes up we'll launch that around then i have mr jonathan rocker headed in this
friday so four or five days from now we're going to record his episode i don't have a drop date for
any of these but i have been curating content so doing the opposite of procrastinating uh we had
v alvarado over last weekend so i've got tons of hard drives of stuff to edit um but it's going to
be good we'll close out season three with a bunch of guest episodes and um i'll take a break during
that time i'll edit the content schedule it out and then hopefully get back to creating some
quality content for i'm not going to talk season four yet we're like just starting into season
three but let's just say the end of season three is going to look way different than the beginning
of season three so it's a little bit that i'll give you now uh other than that enjoy your summer
stay safe happy juneteenth everyone this is i will not lose podcast where we set out to prove
everything is learned from failure and we must persevere and recognize it as one step closer
to success to support the show visit the website shows.acast.com slash i will not lose and subscribe
on your favorite podcast player share this episode link leave a comment your contribution is
appreciated. Thank you for listening.