Episode 104: Tara Claeys & Liam Dempsey

Year 2 In Review

Show Notes

Liam and Tara review the past year of the Hallway Chats podcast, discuss their views about success, share advice and announce plans for year 3.

Tara on Twitter | @taraclaeys

Tara’s pronouns | She/Her

Liam on Twitter | @liamdempsey

Liam’s pronouns | He/Him

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 104.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Liam: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re going to do something a little bit different because this is our 104th episode, which means it is our first episode of our third year of doing this podcast because we post every week. We wanted to review as we did last year, review what we’ve done and talk about some of our favorite moments perhaps and what our plans are for the future and interview each other. So here we are with episode 104.

Liam: Three years, Tara Claeys. Three years.

Tara: Already year three, it’s gone by really fast.

Liam: It has. It has. Can I ask you a question?

Tara: Yes, that’s what we’re here for.

Liam: Did you think when we were first starting to talk back in January of 2017 that we would roll in year three?

Tara: No, only because I didn’t think that far ahead. I guess you got to take some of these things one step at a time, and you keep doing it for as long as you can, or as long as you want to, which is what we’ve agreed to do on a year by year basis. So I guess since we’re starting year three, we can start by saying we are going to continue for another year, right?

Liam: Yes. Yes, we are. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, we’re going to continue for another year. I think that’s one of the things I really liked about our approach among other things, is that we take it in stages – where are you at with life this year, do you want to do it next year one more time, rather than some kind of indefinite commitment, or “this is our ride to the top, or probably our ride to the bottom.”

It’s just let’s keep doing it while we’re having fun, while people seem to be enjoying it, while our guests are enjoying it, while our audience seems to be getting value out of it. Let’s just keep it going. That’s been a lot of fun.

Tara: How about you? Did you imagine that we would still be doing this at this point when we started?

Liam: I think my answer is going to be similar to yours. That I had learned from years of running chickenmonkeydog, kind of a silly, quirky blog that I started with my brother. We eventually had a whole number of writers and for probably the better part of at least several years, we were publishing five days a week, 52 weeks a year. And it was great, and it was fun, and it was really valuable in terms of learning to be creative, or at least productive on-demand.

But when we got to the point where life prevented that from happening, because we didn’t really say, “Hey, let’s commit to this until we can’t,” there was a lot of maybe inner turmoil or an angst on my part. Not that I lost sleep, but it just, “I really should be doing it, I really should be doing it.” And I feel by approaching Hallway Chats with a “let’s give it a year and see, let’s give it a year and see, let’s give it a year and see,” it takes that burden away and really just makes it so that we can assess it as a labor of love. And as long as it is one, we keep going.

Tara: I’m going to say this, and I don’t want it to sound like it probab...