With no time limit at all, it becomes very easy to ramble. That's how you end up with a 5 hour long video. I'm not saying that the quality of the discussion is bad or anything - I'm actually really excited to listen to it. It's just easier to get straight to the point if you give yourself a time limit.
There is actually a much simpler solution: Lesser topics.
Time limits actually create more work for me to do in planning it. To be honest, I did have a sort of time keeper. Every 50-60 minutes I call a break. This was to do two things: One, create your time limit, but also stopping points. "End of topic here, beginning of new topic after break." Two, easier to organize and maybe add in extra stuff in between and to give the listener a breather as well. Giving them a stopping point. Genius if I do say so myself.
Problem was, I was so tired I forgot to implement that system this time and well we rambled like you said. We also had several pause moments where no one would say anything. They really racked up.
We also had more questions this time around and once again we rambled from answering the question to going out left field.
Plus, each guest is different. While some are to the point, others have a hard time expressing what they need to say. I am somewhere in the middle of that. So setting a time limit like that would...well, it would cause more problems then it solves. Using the first and second podcast as example, the system worked perfectly and we got a nice clean podcast. Also given that I was right on the money with each additional person added 30 more minutes to the podcast just one discussion alone.
3 hours is the standard for these podcasts if I use a certain amount of topics and the certain amount of people with the break system. Maybe even less with edits.
This one was just taking on too much at one time with topics that are heavy in discussion. However, certain topics we do NOT need to discuss again ever thanks to this one.
So the podcast will go back to the normal standard from now on.
Edited by James S Cassidy, 10 February 2013 - 05:38 PM.