I have decided to fully cut back my audio podcast consumption. At one point I probably had around 20 that I subscribed to in iTunes. At the moment, I have 13. As  you can see below, there are a lot of episodes I haven’t listened to.

podcasts1

Here is the problem: there are just too many per week. My commute is only between 1 and 1.5 hours per day, which is 5 to 7.5 hours per week. I occasionally listen to podcasts at work but it varies. I almost never listen to podcasts at home, unless it’s finishing an episode (like 10 minutes left) when I get home. At the moment I have 3.9 days worth of unplayed podcasts.

The other issue is that I pretty much never listen to music anymore. And I miss it. I have bought approximately 10 albums in the last two years, most of which have been listened to less than 10 times. That is not what you call getting your money’s worth.

So what to do? With this many podcasts I spend a lot of time playing the catchup game. I have been going through past MacBreak Weeklys this week. I listened to episodes from as far back as December. Some of the news was so old I almost got confused at some points.

I decided that I would narrow down my list of podcasts so that I get about 6 hours of new content per week. This is what I went with:

  1. The BS Report – 1-3 episodes per week, 30-60 minutes per episode, 30-180 minutes per week
  2. MacBreak Weekly – 1 episode per week, 60-100 minutes per episode
  3. TWiT – 1 episode per week, 60-100 minutes per episode
  4. ESPN Baseball Today – (starting in a few weeks) 5 episodes per week, 30 minutes per episode, 150 minutes per week

That is 3 to 9 hours per week. I would say on average it’s around 6.5 hours per week. So even with that list I probably can’t get through everything every week. But I am going to roll with that and hope that I keep up better.

(This post totally ignores video podcasts which I watch at home all the time).

What do you do to keep up on podcasts?