I will, at times, fail. And the more I push myself the more failure I’ll tally—so optimally I’m failing at things semi-regularly.

That’s a tough pill to swallow, as no one (even someone who believes what I believe about the necessity of failure) likes to fail. It doesn’t feel good, it can trigger anxieties, it can even make us question our worth.

I try to work this failure-related self-knowledge into my rituals and routines so that the failures hurt a little less, and so I’m in a good spot to learn from them rather than using them as an excuse to quit something valuable but difficult.

For instance, I publish most of my projects at 10:00am or 2:00pm, local time.

So no matter when I happen to finish an essay or podcast episode, I schedule them to go out at one of those two times on the proper day.

I once used different times for all my projects, based on when email opens and episode listens seemed to be highest, but I eventually aggregated them into these two buckets for simplicity. And I came up with those two times based on how long it would take me to knock something out if I completely forgot to write or record something, and had to scramble to get it done at the last minute.

This doesn’t happen very often anymore, but back when I first started Let’s Know Things in 2016, it happened a few times, and each time was absolutely terrifying.

It doesn’t take me as long to produce a full episode anymore, but in those early days I was still learning to use my microphone, set up my recording environment, produce and edit the audio file, and how to structure and pace the script after doing all the research and writing up what I wanted to convey.

It was a lot! And it still is. But today, I know that if I wake up at 5:00am (which I usually do) on a Tuesday, and realize, oops, I forgot to make this week’s LKT episode, from a standing start (though after a long, exhausting morning) I can still get that episode out the door as intended.

Other projects take less time, so those I feel comfortable publishing/broadcasting at 10:00am.

This is an objectively silly way to come up with a publishing/broadcasting schedule, but I find that accounting for those potential failure states keeps my anxiety related to missing deadlines moderated, while also lending my week additional flexibility, should something unexpected happen and disrupt my usual making-stuff routine.

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