Most podcasters check their numbers the way you check a watch — often, briefly, and without deciding anything. That's not a review. A review ends with a decision.
Here's the one we recommend, and the one our own team runs on the shows we work with. Fifteen minutes, once a week, same time every week.
1. Did the last episode hold people?
Open the episode and look at the retention curve. Not the download count — the curve. Find the largest mid-episode drop and write down the timestamp. That timestamp is your editing note for next week.
2. Are listening hours moving in the right direction?
Zoom out to the last 30 days on the Dashboard. Listening hours is the number that tells you whether your audience is deepening, growing, or drifting. Compare it to the previous 30 days, not to last week — weekly noise will drive you mad.
3. Where is the growth coming from?
Check the platform split. If one platform is carrying all your growth, that's worth knowing before you spend a month optimizing the other one. If your follower count is flat but listeners are up, you're reaching people who don't subscribe yet — a different problem with a different fix.
4. What's the one thing to change?
Not five things. One. Pick from what the first three questions surfaced, and make it the only production note you carry into the next episode.
A review that produces five action items produces none. The constraint is the point.
Why weekly and not daily
Daily checking turns noise into anxiety. Retention curves wobble, reviews arrive in bursts, and a single slow Tuesday doesn't mean anything. Weekly is slow enough that the signal is visible, and fast enough that you can still fix what you find in the next episode.
If you want help deciding what to change, ask Iris what it would look at first — that's what it's there for.