…and to a lesser degree, talk radio.
I am constantly trying to absorb new information. I read the Times and New Yorker a few times a week, I religiously watch Lynda.com videos almost daily. I read long-form articles from Atlantic, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal and I read non-fiction books about culture, places, science and space. I love learning. It’s all I do when I’m not trying new beers, traveling, working or taking photos.
Podcasts have this immense value to me. You can listen to spoken word from your favorite bloggers or keep on top of current events via NPR, explore new foods or laugh a bit as many stand up comedians also moonlight as podcasters.
I’ve been listening on and off to one podcast since 2005. I was a Keith and the Girl listener in 2005 and listened on my commute to Apple when the iPod and iTunes gained native support for podcasts. I even dabbled in my own podcasting from time to time but podcasting never became this part of me that I live and breathe and the primary issue isn’t free-time. It’s the fact that I can’t absorb spoken word unless I am strictly laying down performing zero activities and then spoken word does work for me.
I can sort of listen to podcasts while I’m in the car but I have this Pokemon “gotta catch ‘em all” mentality where my commute to and from work isn’t long enough to listen to most podcasts and then I end up getting behind and when i go to take a longer road-trip, I am 10 episodes behind a podcast and it’s not enough driving time to get through all of them and I simply stop listening and basically unsubscribe.
At some point, the podcasts turn into this to-do list of unread content and I’m too overwhelmed to slowly work through my backlog or accept defeat and just click play on the most recent episode.
What is the solution?
There are probably 20 podcasts that I want to subscribe to and listen to daily. It’s enough content to basically fill one work day per week or 12 hours of driving. I’d have to stop listening to music entirely and take a lot more road trips. The solution for the past 8 years has just been to ignore those podcasts that I want to subscribe to and listen to my 3 songs on the way to work and accept I’ll never know what my favorite bloggers think via spoken word. On longer trips, my GF usually joins me and we spend most of the trips talking instead of listening to music. I assume the same would go for podcasts.
Another alternative would be to cut my reading time in half which is insane because reading is amazing and I can’t consider narrowing my sources to a few blogs and podcasters and leaving out newspaper, New Yorker and BBC America content.
Finally, I could listen to these podcasts at work and only hear every 10th or 20th word and the rest gets drowned out by my one-track mind of working and basically nothing else is ingested or absorbed. My GF asks me why I don’t remember her telling me about a specific upcoming event and I ask, “was I looking at a screen why you were speaking to me? If so, I didn’t hear a word you said.” That’s the same way with podcasts. it’s just background noise.
Beyond podcasts, I want to listen to NPR but once I start, i’ll quickly get absorbed into the multiple remarkable programs and will suddenly realize I don’t have time and then I’m back to stage 1 again of all or nothing.
I don’t really know what the solution is other than to train my brain to multi-task what I hear and still achieve my current work flow. Any ideas? I’m all ears (unless I’m reading a newspaper).