Your Personal Archive: Lessons From Bill Burr's Monday Morning Ritual

Bill Burr started podcasting in 2007. With a flip phone, a call-in conference line with a recording setting that would email him an audio file, and a MySpace account to upload the recording to.

Sounds basic, right? Be honest, it sounds charmingly mid-2000s analog. No fancy mic setup. No editing software. No content strategy. Just a person following a hunch that talking into the void might be worth something. This is how his Monday Morning Podcast was born.

No fancy anythings. No grand idea of what or why. Just a person, with a concept, and a “why not” attitude. He made the commitment to do one a week, to kick the week off, and then he just didn’t stop.

At first it felt awkward. 5 minutes is hard to fill with no plan. But then a plan started to come together and he got comfortable with the no-feedback monologuing. 10 minutes started to be easy. And eventually, he could make an hour.

It became a form of meditation. Or, if you want simpler, it was just a form of practice, maybe even just stretching before practice to prepare for an actual game. Because if you’re not already wondering how it connects to his stage work… well, it doesn’t. He even has a rule about it: nothing from the podcast goes into a show.

Different worlds, different purposes. He explained it on Smartless. How the medium wasn’t for workshopping bits, or even audience building. It was just about prepping for the practice for the actual games of standup.

I’m calling it a Personal Archive. I’m claiming it. And I love how accidental it is. I love how approachable him doing something this seemingly purposeless on purpose is. I got re-inspired hearing him talk about it.

A Personal Archive is not a library. Libraries are collections of polished, published works, mostly created by other people. Bill Burr's specials are in MY library. They don't belong in his.

Personal Archives are different. They're your responses, reactions, and raw reflections on the world around you. They capture not just what happened, but how it felt to you when it did. They're the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your relationship with everything you consume and experience.

And Burr's podcast fits all these criteria perfectly:

• They're timestamped (literally labeled by date)

• They're reflective (his unfiltered thoughts on whatever crossed his mind)

• They're unconstrained (except by the ritual of Monday morning)

• They're honest (painfully so, sometimes)

• And most importantly, they're personal – containing exclusively his voice at work

Stack these up, week after week since 2007, and there's a volume of personality in those files that's more revealing than any crafted special could be. It's raw, so you can dive in anywhere, but take any piece and all you'll see is a guy following his curiosity without concern for whether it leads to a punchline or a profound insight.

It’s standing in a field and pointing at the butterflies telling your friend (or your kids, or whoever), “Hey, let’s catch one, it’ll be fun.” Nothing else. Just something to do that doesn’t feel like a waste of time for reasons you might not even totally understand.

This is where the Creator Flywheel starts spinning, gathering momentum with each rotation. Think about how he’s using this, in phases:

1. Muse (Something outside catches his attention – a news story, a weird interaction at the grocery store, a memory triggered by nothing)

2. Curiosity (It lingers in his mind, demanding attention, raising questions)

3. Creativity (He plays with it on air, forming opinions, finding humor, adding his specific perspective)

4. Habit (He completes the thought, presses stop, and uploads the file)

5. Repeat (Next Monday arrives, and he's back at it again)

Any Personal Archive, whether you call it that or not, is built on spinning this Creator Flywheel, over and over, faster and faster until it gains its own momentum, self-perpetuating the habit.

Bill Burr sits down on a Monday morning and presses record. Whatever's been swirling in his mind since last week becomes the raw material. The muse catches his curiosity. Then, live on record, he gets creative with it – not crafting perfect jokes, but letting his mind wander its natural paths. It's over when he presses stop. It continues with his commitment to return next Monday and do it again.

The practice isn't just the point, it's the whole damn thing.

When I’m scrolling through the notes on my phone, usually on a weekend morning, I’m doing my own version of Bill Burr’s Monday ritual. Different medium, same flywheel. Different jar, same butterflies. This is why Cultish Creative exists on the internet. I won’t tell you to do it too, but I think you should. All I can do is tell you how I do it, and share a story like Bill Burr’s, to point out it’s possible. It might even be easier to make this habit than you think.

On most Friday or Saturday mornings, I scroll through the notes I've captured in my phone from the prior week. There's usually too many fragments, too many half-formed thoughts, all courtesy of my (self-diagnosed) ADHD and OCD brain. But the reason I take this scroll is to find what excites me most, right at that point in time. I’m looking for whatever begs to be expanded into something more complete, and then I write one of these posts to publish the following week.

Hearing Bill Burr describe his process on Smartless, hearing them question him about how it all works, I heard a simple variation on what I’ve been doing for 7+ years now. Him talking about the flip phone and MySpace beginning, that especially reminds me of something most essential in trying to convince more people to pick up this practice: the tools don't matter. The audience doesn't matter. Even the outcome doesn't matter.

All that matters is:

1. A reliable capture method (whatever works for you, I use the notes app on my phone)

2. A regular practice (a Monday morning, a Friday reflection, a daily walk to summon the muse and notice where your curiosity is pulled to be creative)

3. Freedom from outcome (his rule that podcast material isn't for his show is genius, and I have hundreds of posts to vouch for this)

In my life, my Personal Archive isn't about podcast prep or writing a book or client meetings, per se. It's capturing thoughts that could be useful in any of those mediums, but don't have to be. What I know, what Burr figured out too, is that a consistent habit doesn't just get easier - it makes you better at all the other things that habit informs.

His comedy got better because his thinking got clearer. His thinking got clearer because he practiced articulating it, week after week, year after year, into a flip phone on Monday mornings.

What are you waiting for? Your Monday morning is calling. Your flip phone equivalent is in your pocket. Your MySpace is whatever digital or analog corner you can claim as your own.

Notice the butterfly. Realize you’re already holding a net and a jar. The butterfly doesn’t care how fancy your net is, so the question is, are you ready to have some fun?

The practice is waiting to change everything.