The Podcast Time Audit: Where Your Hours Actually Go

You sat down on Saturday morning to “quickly knock out this week’s episode.” Now it is Sunday evening. The episode is published, but somehow two days vanished into editing, writing show notes, and wrestling with social media captions. Sound familiar?

Most podcasters have no idea where their production time actually goes. They know it feels like a lot. They know the work extends far beyond pressing record. But when you ask exactly how many hours go into each episode, the answer is usually a vague grimace followed by “too many.” According to The Podcast Host’s Independent Podcast Report, 55% of podcasters spend between one and five hours per episode, while 13% spend more than ten. That is an enormous range, and it raises an obvious question: what are those hours being spent on?

This post will help you answer that question with a practical exercise you can run in a single week (or whatever your podcast publishing cadence is). No spreadsheets required, just honest tracking. By the end, you will know exactly which production tasks eat your time, where your workflow has hidden bottlenecks, and where you can realistically claw back hours without cutting corners.

Why a time audit matters

Podcasters tend to think about production in two categories: recording and everything else. The problem is that “everything else” contains at least six distinct tasks, each with its own time cost. When they blur together, you cannot tell whether your real bottleneck is editing, promotion, guest scheduling, or the 45 minutes you spend trying to write a compelling episode title.

A time audit separates the blur into categories. Once you can see the breakdown, you can make informed decisions: What should you streamline? What should you automate? What should you outsource? And what is actually fine as it is?

According to Come Alive Creative’s production analysis, a standard interview episode takes roughly five hours from start to finish. Narrative and documentary-style episodes can run well beyond 25 hours. But these are averages. Your show is not average. It has its own format, its own quirks, and its own invisible time sinks. The only way to find them is to track.

The seven stages of podcast production

Before you start tracking, you need a framework. Every podcast episode, regardless of format, moves through roughly seven stages. Some of these take minutes; others can eat an entire afternoon.

1. Planning and research

This covers topic selection, outlining, guest identification, and any background research. For a casual conversational show, planning might take 15 minutes. For a scripted history or true crime podcast, it can stretch to 20 or more hours per episode.

What to track: time spent choosing topics, outlining episodes, researching guests, and preparing reference materials.

2. Scheduling and coordination

If you run an interview show, this one can be deceptively costly. The back-and-forth emails, the calendar juggling, the time zone conversions, and the inevitable rescheduling. Podcasters frequently describe this process as “email tennis,” and for good reason.

What to track: every email, direct message, and calendar adjustment related to booking a guest or coordinating with a co-host.

3. Show prep

Even after the guest is booked and the topic is chosen, there is still work to do: writing interview questions, building the episode structure, preparing talking points, and sometimes briefing the guest. This stage often gets lumped in with “planning,” but it is a separate time cost that happens closer to recording day.

What to track: time spent writing questions, structuring the episode, and communicating prep details to your guest.

4. Recording

This is the one stage most podcasters can estimate accurately, because it is bounded by the clock. A 45-minute conversation takes 45 minutes to record, plus setup and teardown time. Remote recordings through online tools like might add a few minutes for tech checks and troubleshooting.

What to track: the full recording window, from the moment you start setting up to the moment you save the files.

5. Editing and post-production

Here is where the hours hide. Experienced editors typically spend two to four hours on a 30-minute episode. Less experienced editors take longer. The work includes rough cuts, noise reduction, leveling, adding intros and outros, and mastering for final export. A common rule of thumb is to expect three to five minutes of editing for every minute of raw audio, but this varies widely depending on recording quality and complexity.

What to track: every minute spent in your DAW or editing tool, from import to final export.

6. Publishing

After the audio is ready, there is still a checklist to work through: writing the episode title, crafting show notes, adding metadata (season, episode number, categories), creating or selecting artwork, uploading to your hosting platform, setting a publish date, and running a final quality check. These “small” tasks are notorious for adding up.

What to track: everything between exporting your final audio file and hitting publish.

7. Promotion

Once the episode is live, the marketing clock starts. Creating social media posts, writing an email newsletter, cutting audiograms or video clips, posting in communities, and engaging with listeners. The Podcast Host’s industry research shows that promotion is one of the top frustrations for independent podcasters, and it is not hard to see why. Marketing effectively across even two platforms is a significant weekly commitment.

What to track: all time spent promoting the episode, from drafting the first social post to the last comment reply.

How to run your time audit

You do not need a fancy tool. A notes app on your phone works fine. For one full production cycle (from planning to promotion of a single episode), log every task with two pieces of information: what you did and how long it took.

Keep it honest. Include the ten minutes you spent scrolling for the right thumbnail image. Include the 25-minute detour into colour-grading your audiogram. Include the time you spent re-recording your intro because you stumbled on the guest’s name. These are all real production costs, and they only show up if you track them.

At the end of the week, tally your total hours and sort them into the seven categories above.

What the results will show you

Most podcasters who run a time audit are surprised by two things.

First, editing takes longer than they thought. This is consistent with community discussions on forums like r/podcasting (Reddit), where editing is the most frequently cited time sink. If you are spending three or more hours editing a conversational podcast, that is normal, but it is also worth examining. Could better recording practices (a quieter room, a better mic, fewer interruptions) reduce the editing load? Is there a tool out there which can speed up your workflow?

Second, the tasks around the episode take longer than the episode itself. Scheduling, show notes, metadata, promotion: individually, each one seems small. Collectively, they can rival or exceed the recording and editing time combined. These “glue tasks” are where the real efficiency gains live, because many of them follow predictable patterns that lend themselves to templates, batching, or automation.

Where to reclaim time

Once you have your numbers, look for three types of opportunities.

Tasks you can template. If you write similar show notes every week, build a template with placeholder fields. Your title, guest name, topic summary, key timestamps, and links probably follow the same structure every time. The same goes for guest outreach emails, social media captions, and episode descriptions. PodcasterPlus uses magic tags to automate this kind of dynamic content: placeholders like {guest_name} and {episode_title} that populate automatically, so you write the template once and reuse it forever.

Tasks you can batch. Recording multiple episodes in a single session eliminates repeated setup time and keeps you in a creative rhythm. The same principle applies to editing, writing show notes, and scheduling social posts. Batching cuts context-switching, and context-switching is one of the most underrated time costs in podcast production.

Tasks you can automate or delegate. Guest reminders, booking confirmations, publish notifications, and social media posting are all candidates for automation. PodcasterPlus’s automation engine handles sequences like these with time-based and event-based triggers, so you set them up once and they run without you. If editing is your biggest cost and it likely is, consider whether outsourcing it to a professional editor would free up enough time to justify the expense. Many podcasters find that the hours they reclaim are worth more than the editing fee.

For a deeper look at the full production workflow and how to build repeatable systems, The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Podcast in 2025 walks through each stage in detail.

A realistic time budget

Based on industry data and community discussions, here is what a reasonable time budget looks like for a weekly 45-minute interview podcast produced by a solo podcaster:

Stage	Estimated time
Planning and research	30 min
Scheduling and coordination	30 min
Show prep	45 min
Recording (including setup)	60 min
Editing and post-production	2-3 hours
Publishing (show notes, metadata, upload)	30 min
Promotion	45 min
Total	5.5-6.5 hours

Your numbers may be higher or lower. The goal is not to hit a specific target. The goal is to know your numbers, identify the stages that feel disproportionate, and make deliberate choices about where to invest your time.

UPDATE – have a look at How to Start a Podcast in Hours, Not Weeks.

The bigger picture

Podcasting is worth the hours. More than 584 million people listened to podcasts in 2025, according to Riverside’s podcast statistics roundup, and listener engagement remains remarkably high. The audience is there. The question is whether your production process is sustainable enough to keep showing up for them week after week.

That is what a time audit is really about. Not squeezing every last second out of your workflow, but understanding where your time goes so you can protect the parts that matter most: the conversations, the stories, the content only you can create. Everything else, the scheduling, the show notes, the metadata, the reminders, is operational work. And operational work is exactly what tools and systems are built to handle.

Run the audit. Find your numbers. Then decide what stays manual and what gets handed off to a better process.

Explore how PodcasterPlus automates the operational side of podcasting →