I love listening to podcasts. I started three years ago, never looked back. Thanks to podcasts, reading books has taken a backseat. Authors appear as podcast guests when they launch their books. Podcasts seem to be on their way to becoming the primary marketing platform for book launches. During the show, authors highlight the big ideas from their books. One can get a concise book summary by listening to these conversations.
I listen to podcasts when I walk, run, cycle, drive, and sometimes while I do household chores. This is what I love about podcasts—I can mix them with physical activity and mundane tasks. As you progress in life, time becomes valuable, and podcasts help me optimize my time while satisfying my craving for knowledge and wisdom.
I subscribe to more than 90 podcasts. Not all episodes of a particular podcast are worth listening to; I have to pick and choose. Some of the memorable shows that I have heard are from podcasts under the radar with non-descript people.
Below is the system I use to manage the 90 odd podcasts with minimal time investment.
- I subscribe to podcasts through Google Podcasts. I have tried other apps in the past; I have settled on the Google one. Google Podcasts shows a red dot(like a notification) on a podcast whenever a new episode is released.
- I keep a queue(akin to a playlist) of episodes to listen to from various podcasts. Every Saturday(or Sunday), I replenish the queue. I limit the queue size to ten.
- When replenishing the queue, I go through new episodes and add them. I stop when my queue has ten episodes. For example, if my queue already has eight episodes, I add only two.
- When I listen to podcasts, I have a rule to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. Ten minutes into a show, if I find it uninteresting, I stop and start the next one.
The above system helps me listen to a large and diverse set of shows without wasting time managing them.
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