Today I decided to press the publish button on a podcast that I’m not completely happy with. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think I’ve ever published something that I’m 100% happy with.

I don’t think there’s anything that’s perfect.

But back to the podcast.

There was a lot of hissing, distortion, and background noise from one of the mics. I think it happened because the cable became loose halfway through the recording.

I waited to the last-minute to start editing so I didn’t catch the error until the night before the release date. I spent hours trying to fix the issue but didn’t find anything that worked.

So I had to come to a decision. The options I thought of at the time. Cut the episode short, or cut out everything from the second mic. Push back the scheduled release date and record the corrupted audio segments again. Not publish anything this week. Publish what I had even though half of it would be painful to listen to.

Sometimes consistency is better than quality. In this case I felt that having 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

I choose consistency over quality and here’s why.

Learn from the pain. I’m going to be honest I’m a little bit embarrassed be this mistake. I’m usually better at checking the quality of the audio during the recording sessions. As the podcast producer, audio engineer, tech guy, it’s my job to make sure we maintain high quality. I failed this time, but take complete ownership. The next at bat will be better.

Continue to build momentum. The podcast has been going strong for 7 months now. We’ve release a new episode each week. That’s a lot of momentum that has built up. Momentum can be hard to build, but once you have it can propel you forward. At the same time momentum is easy to lose. That’s why hacks like the x-card technique can be beneficial. The risk of losing seven months of momentum due to a technical issue was something I didn’t want to chance.

Doesn’t matter in the long run. Let’s be honest less than 10 minutes of bad audio in a 30 minute podcast doesn’t matter that much. We’ve published over 1,120 minutes of audio in the past seven months. The lower quality 10 minutes release today is less than 1% of the total amount of audio time released. I hope that fans of the podcast will understand.

“I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.” — LeBron James

When have you chosen consistency over quality?