Streamline Your Podcast with Notion and AI
Use templates and no-code tools to finish your work and enjoy life
Are you tired of spending hours producing your podcast, only to get lackluster results?
Tools like computers and AI should be freeing up our time — not enslaving us in our cubicles. If your podcast is forcing you to spend more time at your desk, and less time actually enjoying your life, you might be doing it wrong.
Allison Willis is a podcast production whiz who has mastered the art of the podcasting workflow from guest coordination to promotion — making organization feel effortless.
She does it using Notion, the all-in-one-workspace. It starts with a master calendar and a smart to-do list to streamline your podcast production process. But that’s just the beginning. As a no-code tool, Notion allows you to customize templates for pretty much everything, and use built-in AI tools to craft show notes and social media assets.
In short, Notion can make you into an efficient beast — tuning your podcast production engine from a beater into a sports car. If you’re a busy professional in addition to hosting your podcast, you can’t afford to keep driving a beater.
Contrary to popular perception, efficiency doesn’t mean robotic mechanization; it means getting your work done so that you can go and play outside. Templates are not going to do your work for you, but they are going to make it easier, faster, and generally more fun.
Here are Alli’s three recommendations for enhancing your podcast’s workflow:
1. Creation a Notion Dashboard to Manage your Podcast Calendar
A well-designed dashboard can significantly streamline the production process for a new podcast.
We start with a database in “Board View” that lets you visualize and track progress using the Kanban method. Each episode is a “card” that moves from the idea phase, through to completion. That way you don’t have to search through your emails to see when you last contacted someone or to find where you are in a conversation.
The reason your podcast projects always lose steam isn’t because you lack motivation or good ideas; it’s because you’re not clear on what you should do next. You’re trying to hold everything in your head — or a tangled mess of emails and Google docs . As a result of all the context switching, you lose the plot and give up just before reaching the finish line.
This is where the idea of “templatizing your workflow” comes into play, and automating as many of the steps as possible.
You can add a Calendar view of the same database to see who’s scheduled for interviews, and when episodes are set to be released.
Within each card, you can store notes or outlines for the interview, and keep track of where you are within a given workflow. Have you sent the guest the calendar invite with the studio link? Recorded the episode, but not yet edited it? Have you prepped all of your social media assets so you can make a coordinated promotional push when the release date arrives?
Notion recently added a new “button” feature that allows you to automatically generate a set of tasks associated with a particular episode, streamlining the organization process. At the same time, the focus remains on simplicity and avoiding overuse of features that can distract from the primary tasks. It is important to avoid implementing too many features or fancy buttons, since they can detract from the goal of increasing efficiency and instead create confusion in the workflow.
2. Use Custom Notion A.I. Prompts to Generate SEO-Optimized Show Notes
Notion’s built-in AI tools can be particularly useful for generating show notes — providing accurate synopses and timestamped summaries based on your transcript. However, relying solely on AI can result in a loss of nuance and specificity in content. You need a human’s oversight to maintain quality.
Alli discusses her experience using Capsho, an AI-assisted show notes generator, which produced an oversimplified and slightly inaccurate summary.
In the end, our team came up with our own hand-made templates to generate specific assets for show notes from our own proprietary prompts.
You can download the free Notion 2nd Brain template here.
3. Using Gmail’s Canned Responses to Save Time on Repeat Communications
Email templates can be an effective way to save time in communication while ensuring professional consistency. By creating pre-written responses and layouts, email templates streamline correspondence and reduce the time spent composing individual messages.
Alli’s uses Gmail’s built-in “canned responses” feature, and makes sure that any areas that need to be personalized are highlighted in bright red.
“I like to go through all my templates and highlight in red what has to change. Because you don’t want to start emailing Susan with a ‘Hi, Anthony’ email or ‘Hi, [first name]’.”
Life is too short to spend precious hours re-typing the same messages, and trying to remember what comes next in a podcasting workflow.
To get started streamlining your own podcast with Notion, download the Podcasting Second Brain template.
Start podcasting like a pro, and reach out if you ever need help transcribing your podcast into polished prose, or starting a podcast en route to writing a book: http://Vergili.us
