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Thursday, October 12, 2017

Too Many Podcasts

I think I've reached the point where I'm subscribed to too many podcasts. I love them, I enjoy listening to them, but I went from searching for something to listen to because I was finished with everything to OMG I can't believe I have this many podcasts in my app! Gah! (I won't address how many audio books I have to listen to still. That's a blog for another day.)

Part of the problem is that I found a few writing podcasts. I only downloaded a few episodes to check them out, but those few sit in queue.

Some podcasts that I love were on summer hiatus and now they're back, including one of my favorites, You Must Remember This about old Hollywood as well as a few others. There are a couple of more whose hiatus should be ending shortly and I'm trying to get caught up before they come back.

I also haven't had the listening time lately that I usually have and that's one of the biggest issues. I'm used to having more time than I've had the past few months.

The final two factors are: How often some of these podcasts update and how long they are. I'm a Mysterious Universe subscriber so I get two episodes a week instead of only one and the one on Friday has bonus content which will frequently go over 2.5 hours and sometimes close to 3 hours.

As I became more and more stressed about falling behind in my podcast listening, my iPhone started nagging me about being low on memory. This is a company phone and that means I only have 16 GB of space for everything. This has taught me one thing--if I ever have to buy my own smartphone, get one a heck of a lot more memory. In fact, I don't think Apple even makes 16 GB phones any longer.

I reached a decision--turn off auto-update for almost all my podcasts.

Oh, I left a few on: Mysterious Universe, By the Book, Scriptnotes, and a few others (not many) and I still feel stressed every time they update, but these are podcasts I generally listen to right away, too impatient to wait.

This has been working. So far. I'm still behind and still trying to get caught up, but at least the flood has been more or less stemmed. I hope I can get caught up before Christmas. I guess we'll see.