Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Podcast Overload

It is the start of 2019 and a lot of people talk about resolutions. As I have written before, I am not one of those people. I think that everyone has the opportunity to change things about their life whenever they choose to. That having been said, when someone has a long term, say a year long, project, starting on 1 January is a good benchmark for measuring the progress over the course of a year.
Most people who know me in the walking around world know that I like podcasts. I like them a lot. I listen to topics ranging from technology, to space, to running to movies and other sorts of stuff. The term problem would be a strong one, so I will say issue instead. The issue is that I have quite a backlog of podcasts. 711 podcasts as of the morning of January 1.
Screen shot from my Overcast app.
That represents about 33.2 GB of space, or half the total capacity of my iPad Air 2. Some of the files go back as far as 2016.
Some people talk about declaring podcast bankruptcy, which is the simple act of clearing out some or the entire podcast queue and starting over. I really don't want to do that. Some of the files are for podcasts that have completed their run of shows, such as Canvas. I want to finish that run of show out and that act will help to reduce some of the total shows and memory space used. There are other shows, that I will stop after I finish a particular run of shows, such as The Horror Aisle, where my brother was one of the hosts. I want to finish out his run on the show.
The other thing is that it seems like I hear about new podcasts that I want to start listening to all of the time. One show in particular, Friends in Your Ears, seems to always suggest one or two new shows to try out. When people ask me how I find out about new shows, I always recommend that one as a place to start.
As for my strategy to get caught up on Podcasts in 2019, the first is to  keep current on the ones that I am listening to now. I am adjusting one of Dave Ramsey's baby steps for getting out of debt by getting caught up and staying current on shows, like one might get caught up on past due bills and stay current on those moving forward.
The second step is to work on completing the podcast runs of shows that have ended, or I know where my finishing point is. Then, the last pieces is to simply listen to a couple more shows than I download. Some shows are super short, while others are anywhere from 90 minutes to the occasional 3 hour show. Let's see how this goes.
As far as this project goes, my plan is to update my progress here on a weekly basis. It will not be the only thing that I write about, but it will be a recurring topic as 2019 goes. I will mention when a show ends, I get caught up, or when start a new one in a moment of weakness. This should be a fun experiment.