We’re Pausing the Weekly Pulse (Productive Flourishing Pulse #479)
And a little behind-the-scenes on why
We're starting a new experiment by pausing the weekly Pulse for May, June, and July.
While the Pulse takes a summer break, we won't be quiet. We’ll still be sharing and publishing posts and resources, including potentially kicking off the next season of the podcast in a new format.
If you’re not into behind-the-scenes creator discussions, feel free to carry on and focus on something else that matters to you. :)
A pause, giving 80% of our readers the perfect moment to smile and move on with their day.
When we moved Productive Flourishing to Substack in October, we changed a lot at once. We’re still ironing out the kinks and answering your questions about where to find things and what’s shaking up around here.
I kept the weekly Pulse going as a familiar touchpoint amid all the changes. But, if I'm honest, it’s felt a bit like a holdover from our old ways of doing things. With Substack’s robust features, everyone’s already in the loop with our latest shares and persistently valuable gems from our archives — no Pulse needed.
In the past, tracking down podcast episodes felt like a mini treasure hunt thanks to the quirks of WordPress. We needed the Pulse to share our podcast episodes, but now, thanks to Substack’s streamlined approach, every new episode pops up right in your feed, nestled among all our other content. Easy peasy.
Since Substack does so much of the streamlining for us, the Pulse doesn't have the same job it once had. If you've been around a long time, you know that I killed the newsletter many years ago, but it came back because I had enough people let me know that it was hard to figure out what I’d published.
Since we’re moving into the summer and our audience’s cadence and content preferences typically switch, it’s a good time for this experiment.
Zooming up, my sense is that a lot of people are content fatigued. Before the move, I had already decided that we were moving away from positioning the value-add of subscribing (and the Pulse) as merely NEW and MOAR content, as NEW and MOAR aren't really value-added in the world of AI-generated content.
More resonant, insightful, useful, relevant, connected, and coherent is valuable and worth subscribing and engaging with.
My intent is to reallocate the time, energy, attention, and money we're spending on the weekly Pulse (that may not really have a job anymore) to essays, unearthing buried frameworks and resources, collabs, and kickstarting the podcast again.
There's one lingering job that the weekly Pulse has: nudging, reminding, and guiding those of us who tend to lose track of where we are in the year. We'll incorporate some of that into our monthly planning tips and see if that's sufficient.
Let's see what happens. :)
~Charlie
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