Tackling My Podcast Queue
As I write this, my podcast queue is sitting at 1,136 episodes. Wowzers! If I listen to every episode in its entirety at normal speed would take almost 40 days. I might have a problem, and I think I need to come up with a way to help tackle this.
I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to tackle things. I’ve come up with two ideas.
Chronological
This method is what I’ve generally been doing. With only a few exceptions, I add any new episodes that I add to my queue to the end so I listen to the oldest episodes first.
By Podcast
I’ve toyed with this idea in that I choose a podcast, and only listen to that podcast until all the episodes are listened to. At that point, I then choose the next podcast to listen to until I’m caught up.
Some Policies
I have a very large number of podcasts I subscribe to. Some release episodes where I want to listen to almost all of them, others where there's only a handful that might interest me. I'm thinking for tackling this queue, I'm going to set some ground rules or policies so to speak.
- Don't Hesitate to Just Archive - I use PocketCasts for podcasts. The archive action marks it as "listened to" and archives it. I'm not going to hesitate to do this for any episodes where I'm like 10 minutes in and am just not "feeling it", I'm just going to archive it and go to the next episode.
- Unsubscribe When It Makes Sense - This applies for the podcasts where I'm only interested in a handful of episodes. If I keep finding the episodes not as interesting as I expected, I'll give serious considering to unsubscribing from the podcast completely.
- Continue Listening at 2x Speed - I generally listen to podcasts at double speed. I'm planning on sticking with that speed to help keep things going.
Hope for the Best
I'm going to hope for the best and keep at it. Hopefully I can see the queue drop down consistently. I keep adding more episodes, but hopefully I can listen to more than I add.