How do you keep podcasting over the holidays without losing your streak? Holiday travel and family plans eat the routine that kept you consistent all year, and the recording day you locked in probably lands on Christmas or New Year's Eve (great timing). That's how a strong year ends in a slow drift, and it's a big reason so many shows podfade in January.
In this episode we walk through a November plan that lets December publish itself. We cover how to batch two or three episodes in one recording session to build an episode buffer, how to run a lighter seasonal format like a year in review or listener questions, and when a planned hiatus with a set return date makes more sense. Then we set your January restart trigger before you log off, so you come back to a recording day and a first episode already picked and get to skip the post-holiday fog.
CHAPTERS
The problem: the holidays break the routine that kept you consistent
Build a holiday podcast buffer in November
Batch two or three episodes before December hits
Run a lighter format for the season
Or take a planned hiatus, done right
Set the January restart trigger before you log off
What this means for staying consistent
LINKS
Full show notes: https://thesteadypack.com/blog/2026-11-01-podcasting-over-the-holidays
Podfade: why podcasts quit and how to prevent it: https://thesteadypack.com/blog/2026-07-19-podfade-why-podcasts-quit-and-how-to-prevent-it
Batch recording: how to record a month of content in one day: https://thesteadypack.com/blog/2026-03-08-batch-recording-mastery-how-to-record-a-month-of-podcast-content-in-one-day
The one-episode buffer: https://thesteadypack.com/blog/2026-06-28-the-one-episode-buffer
The Steady Pack on Substack: https://thesteadypack.substack.com/
Newsletter: https://thesteadypack.com/newsletter
Unleashed Podcasts (meet Daisy, your accountability coach): https://unleashedpodcasts.com/
Transcript
Scott Keck-Warren
0:06
So if you're anything like us, your consistency runs on a routine, and the holidays are the antithesis of this. You're the same creator, but your scaffolding has kind of fallen apart. The 2 weeks around Christmas and New Year's makes it easy to create a gap, which causes a strong year to end quietly, not with a decision, but with a drift. So our goal in this video is to give you a system that you can use in November so that December publishes itself, even if you fall offline because of the holidays. It's a very simple process. You're just gonna bank episodes now and release them on a schedule. It works because you're going to trade a very heavy, busy November for what is essentially a free December. And this will allow you to front-load a bunch of your work while you're still in the mode of that routine that you spent so much of the year cultivating. Our first suggestion is to batch record 2 or 3 episodes before December even hits. You can do this in one recording session in November that will help cover the weeks while you'll be away. We've talked about this in our post about batch recording. Because it's December, people are already kind of looking for lighter fare, so you can do something like a short solo reflection, a year in review, or listener questions. It's all content that has a lower lift, but it's still content that you can publish easily. The other thing that I'm going to do is give you permission, not that you need it, to just take a planned hiatus. You can stop on purpose and let everyone know that you're going to return on a specific day, and that way you've chosen the break and it hasn't chosen you. And then finally, decide what your first January episode and recording day will be. Future you will love this because you won't have to come back from your vacation in that post-holiday fog trying to remember where you left off and What you were going to do. We like to think of December as a stress test for your show. If you have a show that survives the holiday on an episode buffer, it's gonna survive most things. Interruptions like the holidays are always going to come up, and you don't want them to cause pod fade. Creating a plan for December will help prevent that. If you do your best to protect that December to January handoff, you're gonna keep your whole year's momentum instead of restarting from zero in January. So if you found this and you're looking for better systems and processes, make sure you subscribe. If you want some more support, Unleashed Podcast gives you tools to track your December plan in an integrated package. This is Scott Keck Warren, and you've been listening to the Study Pack. Choose progress over perfection, and I'll see you next week.