When I was programming radio, everything came back to routine.
What time does the listener wake up? When are they in the shower? When are they getting the kids out the door? When do they get into the car, and when do they walk into work?
We had ratings. We had research. We had more spreadsheets than anyone should ever have to look at. But behind every one of those numbers was something much simpler: human behavior.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to. Have technology and changing lifestyles destroyed those routines? Or have they made understanding routine more important than ever?
We Were Programming People, Not Just Clocks
The programming clock was never just a map of where the songs, commercials and talk breaks went. It was built around what we believed the listener was doing at that exact moment.
Morning-drive pacing shifted as the morning went on. The 6 a.m. listener and the 8:30 listener weren’t living the same life, and good shows didn’t treat them the same way. Benchmarks were scheduled on purpose. Contesting ran at certain times for a reason. Features lived in predictable places so people knew exactly when to tune in.
Think about the continuing saga. It’s the bit that lives in the same spot every day so listeners can follow the story from one morning to the next. If it ran at 6:20 yesterday, it runs at 6:20 today and picks up where it left off. There are two schools of thought on that. Some programmers swear by it, and others steer clear. I’ve always leaned toward running it at the same time to keep the story going, hoping it sticks with the listener. The risk, of course, is that a weak story sticks around too.
But that debate isn’t really the point. The point is that we were programming for people, not just clocks.
And repetition wasn’t always the enemy. Sometimes repetition is what created the habit.
We weren’t just trying to get somebody to listen today. We were trying to get them to come back tomorrow at the same time.
Then the Routine Got Blown Up
First came the smartphone. Then streaming, podcasts and on-demand everything. Then work from home, hybrid schedules and flexible hours rewrote what a weekday even looks like for a lot of people.
The old assumption — that millions of people were essentially doing the same thing at 7:45 every morning — isn’t nearly as reliable as it used to be. The commute that once delivered a captive audience looks different now, and for some listeners it’s gone entirely.
But that doesn’t mean routine disappeared.
People still wake up and immediately reach for something. They still have morning habits, workout habits, driving habits and nighttime habits. They’re just not necessarily the same habits as everybody else’s.
The mass routine fragmented into millions of individual routines. One person’s morning drive is another person’s walk down the hall to the home office. One person’s workout playlist is another person’s podcast queue.
Routine didn’t die. It personalized.
The Algorithm Is Really a Routine Machine
Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and every other platform fighting for our attention study behavior constantly. What do you consume? When do you consume it? What usually comes next? What keeps you there, and what makes you swipe away?
Strip away the engineering and those aren’t new questions. They’re the same ones we asked in programming meetings for decades. Technology is simply doing at an individual level what programmers once tried to do across an entire market.
Radio was programming the algorithm long before most anybody knew what an algorithm really was.
Today we have more data than programmers could have imagined 25 years ago. Streaming numbers. Digital analytics. Social engagement. Ratings. Dashboards on top of dashboards.
But numbers only tell us what happened. Great programming still requires asking why it happened.
What was that person doing when they tuned in? Why did they stay? Why did they leave? What would make them come back tomorrow? A dashboard can show you the exact minute someone tuned out. It can’t tell you what was happening in their kitchen when they did.
The Opportunity: Learn the New Routine
Radio shouldn’t be trying to recreate 1998 listening behavior. That world isn’t coming back, and chasing it burns energy we could be spending somewhere more useful.
The better questions are right in front of us. What does someone’s morning actually look like now? Where does radio fit alongside Spotify, podcasts, YouTube and social? What habits can our personalities create? What can we do at a predictable time that gives somebody a reason to return?
And maybe the biggest one: Can broadcast, apps, podcasts, video and social work together around a listener’s routine, rather than operating as separate products under the same logo? The brands that figure that out won’t just be on the air. They’ll be part of somebody’s day.
Technology changed. The commute changed. Work changed. Media consumption changed.
But human beings are still creatures of habit. Silicon Valley didn’t invent that. It simply built better technology for recognizing it.
Maybe radio doesn’t need to reinvent human behavior. Maybe we just need to understand the new routine — and earn our way back into it.
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