Friday rundown, unpack and declutter

I'm not even talking about the gazillion boxes in my home. I mean the files. The audio recordings, the documents, the endless imagery I created throughout September.

Anyone who knows me would tell you I am the organized one. Right now my Mac desktop, my files, and my downloads folder are a total fucking shitshow.

One month of neglect

One month of neglect, and I have to admit I wasn't the most disciplined. I did make backups. But copying everything, pasting it somewhere, and forgetting about it was never going to cut it. A backup of a mess is still a mess, just stored twice.

So I'm working on a new, better approach, and it's going to take up a good chunk of my weekend. The Achilles heel is the podcast recordings from every channel. Each show has its own raw takes, edits, and exports, and when they all land in the same few folders, finding the one file I need turns into a small archaeology project.

That's my focus this weekend. Declutter, one file at a time.

How the morning started

My first blog post of October wasn't just rambling. It helped me start Friday and end up where I should. Rereading it this morning put my brain in work mode, and I went straight to finishing the Echo Room website.

Read also: Small wins, Echo Room & pace

Echo Room is done

It's now fully done and set up the way I want it. Clear calls to action, a list of upcoming episodes, and the published ones, each with their own bullet points.

The feed pulls automatically from Spotify, so 95% of the manual work is gone. Building that properly took me a whole afternoon, including wiring the entire site into the Ryoka Dashboard.

The one thing I still do by hand is publish from Ryoka OS with bullet points. I figured this podcast shouldn't have a full script. It's free talk, and writing out a script for something unscripted makes no sense. Bullet points do the job faster.

Done and dusted. Podcast live, YouTube live, distribution done, website completely done.

The TWO website, again

My other intention today was to build the TWO website. It's always on the schedule, but this week just didn't go the way it was supposed to.

The Studio page became the benchmark, and from there I slowly started working on other pages. Looking at it now, I started a bit too chaotically. Jumping between pages without a plan is the same pattern that wrecked my desktop.

So this weekend I'll sit down, take some structured notes, run the site through Screaming Frog to pull up all the URLs and SEO titles, and work my way from there. Seeing everything in one list should show me where the real gaps are, instead of guessing page by page.

What's left of today?

I don't have that much to say in this Friday rundown, because my day isn't over yet. I still plan to record bedtime stories and make a proper content plan for my podcasts.

Read also: I mapped out my podcast workflow. Turns out it's not that complicated

I've already set up and designed the entire workflow. Still, I feel like I need to go over it one more time and reread older blog posts to remember what my true intentions were with recording and planning. It's easy to build a system and then slowly drift away from the reason I built it.

A pass of a week

Overall, I think this week is a pass. I fell behind on writing and didn't publish as many blog posts as I wanted, but I'll gradually catch up this weekend.

Mostly, I'm glad I survived. That was my entire intention since Monday, and I'll take it.

Read also: Monday preparation #3: mostly surviving

Final note

Today was a good, productive day and a solid start to October. Echo Room is finished, the TWO site has a plan, and the mess on my desktop has a weekend with its name on it.

Not everything got done this week, but the things that were important did, and I know what the next two days look like. That's enough for a Friday. I am still physically recouping :)