🌎 Here's exactly how we spend our time and your money

Research, broad and specific. I read, annotate, or at least comb through hundreds of resources every week to inform my essays, recording, offline conversations, news-roundups, and to simply level-up my own questions and understanding on a broad level, and in more specific niches like community health clinics, air cleaning, wastewater, or trees. Articles, books, threads, podcasts, YouTube, you name it.

Offline research conversations, broad and specific, timely and evergreen. Same as above. I’m preposterously lucky to be able to call/email/text/DM some of the smartest people on the frontlines of the future, who are always willing to lend their time and expertise.

Writing. Like many of you, I not only publish my writing, but use it to work out my own thoughts, to find connections and through-lines, and better understand how some new (or old) development corresponds with our mission here.

Editorial production and planning. Willow manages our week-to-week editorial, and it is VERY MUCH not a small job. Willow is increasingly also taking the lead to shape our editorial direction. We understand that it matters what we cover, what we don’t, and who we extend the mic to and who we don’t. But also what goes where — what makes more sense for print, or video, etc. We’re also careful (though not always successful) to not take on too much at once.

Producing the newsletter. This has changed over time, but identifying, outlining, writing, and editing an essay that is both immediately relevant and actionable, but hopefully somewhat evergreen, is a tall task that takes all week — and only after that’s completely done we bring in our action steps, the news, and more. Once it’s in your inbox and live on the web, I begin to adapt a version for audio and now, video too, record them both, and get what feels like 56 different files to our editors for production, review, and publishing.

Producing the podcast. Finding guests, responding to incoming requests, scheduling, connecting, building research time and resources, recording, post-production — it’s a lot, but we try to put out something deserving of your precious time.

Producing YouTube. This one’s fairly new, so we’re still getting our feet under us, but producing video is a whole different area of study and specific set of skills, and takes up a lot of time, from tinkering with equipment to building a strategy and pipeline to making sure I wore a shirt to the office that is not covered in avocado.

Engaging with Members. The more folks join the Membership, the more folks we all have to engage with, and that’s how we build something better. We’re live on INI Slack and now in Comments, too.

Working on the site and our other tools. We’re always optimizing for the best, most engaging, and most helpful experience for new visitors/ readers/listeners/viewers, and for Members, crossed with the most useful patchwork of tools that reduce our admin time. It’s somewhat never-ending but worth it.

Building new tools. We’ve got some VERY cool stuff in the hopper and building them requires significant time and resources. Members go a long way towards putting a down payment towards tools that could help many, many people.

Working with partners. Like our Rewiring America partnership, these partnerships are invaluable but require significant time and planning behind the scenes — on top of our regular workload.

Doing sponsor work. Lordy. Tracking our KPIs, engaging with potential sponsors, saying no to most of them, keeping track of myriad details, doing reporting, etc.

Writing and sending thank you’s to pod guests. Probably the most fun part of my week.

I think that’s it?