Productivity gurus promise us that, with enough organization and attention to detail, we can control the chaos in our lives. Australian comics Inger Mewburn and Jason Downs have taken that premise and skewered it brilliantly in their excellent podcast, ‘On the Reg’.
Ostensibly, ‘On the Reg’ is a podcast about productivity. The joke is, of course, that each episode is a train wreck of random timing, failed tech and meandering asides. They claim that they do multiple restarts for many episodes and have even lost whole episodes. On a recent show, Jason promises that he will go deep on Omnifocus. This is built up throughout the show until, inevitably, they run out of time and Jason’s only contribution is that Omnifocus can’t solve everything. Brilliant!
Even the name is part of the joke. Show-lore says that ‘On the Reg’ came about because Jason and Inger wanted to talk to one another, but couldn’t organize themselves to do that. So they decided to have a regular (on the reg – get it) catch-up, record it and publish it as a podcast. How productive of them. Of course, it’s never been regular. Even though they now work together, they continue to find it difficult to schedule time to make the pod. Some months there are two shows, some months there are none. Scheduling – who needs it. ;-)
‘On the Reg’ comes with its own drinking game called ‘snippity-do-dah’. In a show that is literally about managing time, Inger claims that she will cut episodes (‘snippity-do-dah’) down to size in post production. Of course, that never happens, but you get to drink every time she says it. They’ve managed to keep the show under 30 minutes about five times (including one episode that is eleven and a half minutes, followed by the episode that is sub-two minutes). These are wonderfully balanced by the multiple episodes that are over two hours long. As time has gone on, the average run time has gotten longer and longer, as Inger and Jason find more and more, longer and longer tangents to take them off track. Episodes currently average about 1 hour 45 minutes, and I can’t get enough of them.
Their level of attention to detail is staggering. They even have Easter eggs in the metadata. Multiple episodes have no season number and / or no episode number. The season 2 episode about yak shaving that comes between episode 22 and episode 23 is episode 22.5, I guess.
Inger and Jason have perfected that Australian brand of self-deprecating humour that subverts the very thing that it is about. Think Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan’s fabulous Katering Show but with Bullet Journals instead of food intolerances. I love it.
