How do y’all manage what to listen to during a podcast-listening session?
I listen to podcasts in 90-minute sessions while walking the dog.
Before I start, I open my “New” playlist, which contains all of my podcast episodes in reverse chronological order, the newest first.
I move whatever I want to listen to soon into my Queue, and then flip over to the queue and order the podcasts in the order I want to listen to them. Lately, that means one or two timely podcasts at the top, and playing the rest in oldest-first order.
How do you all do it?
P.S. This might be a fun discussion on a follow-up episode of MPU. @MacSparky @ismh86
1 Like
I have 5-7 playlists in overcast I gather shows around themes I’m interested in; movies, music, stories, a “daily” playlist for daily/hourly news, a broad “learning” category that’s basically productivity topics, etc. I’ll add and remove podcasts from these channels as my interest waxes and wanes.
As far as organizing them, i just peruse the playlists as I have time and interest throughout the week and add episodes that catch my interest to the queue playlist. And when I want to see what’s new in a category (usually the daily playlist) I’ll just hop into those as time and interest allow.
Do you decide what to listen to next as each episode ends, one at a time?
When I listen to podcasts, I’m walking the dog, driving, or doing household chores. I want to minimize the time interacting with my phone, so I queue up a few episodes at once in advance and listen to those in order. Often, I do find myself deciding I don’t want to listen to a podcast after all, and in that case, I have to get my phone out of my pocket and delete the current episode. But still my goal is to minimize the necessity to look at and tap the phone while walking the dog, driving, washing dishes, etc.
I usually go organize the queue playlist after I add a couple episodes. But ya I’m not the completionist i used to be for sure, sometimes (usually) I won’t be able to listen to an episode for a while in the queue and it will become irrelevant or I’ll read an article that I can get the same info from the podcast etc.
I do like the Apple Watch overcast app and I even sync the queue playlist to it so if I’m ever without my phone I still have my recent episodes. And I find the Watch is really handy to skip forward/back, adjust speed, etc so I do use that a lot.
1 Like
I only let shows auto-queue that I really want to hear. So if it’s a day when I don’t want to tap apps more than the bare minimum, I just hit play and start driving/exercising/pulling weeds.
Most of the rest is standard Castro first/last/skip. Once an episode’s in queue I usually don’t reorder it. Stop triaging any time; no need for inbox zero.
If I’m very excited about an episode, I hit play from the inbox and take an extra long walk or drive to accommodate it.
1 Like
All of my podcasts are now in a single playlist in Overcast.
There are three priorities each sorted chronologically.
I open overcast and just hit play on whatever is at the top of the playlist. I have continuous play switched on with “Play the top podcast”
Occasionally I delete individual Podcast episodes I know I don’t want to listen to, but on the whole that’s rare as I only subscribe to podcasts I want to listen to.
2 Likes
I’m down to two playlists now — New and Queue. I wonder whether I can get it down to one?
A major obstacle to getting it down to one is that some of my podcasts run multi-part series and often I get behind. If I sort the playlist “newest first,” I’ll see those multi-part series in backwards order. If I sort them oldest-first, I’ll be looking at episodes from 2022 at the top of the list.
Is that problem for you and if so how do you solve it?
1 Like
I have three core playlists.
“Daily” is everything I’m pretty much committed to listening to every day. Audio Bible, news, etc. I’ll sometimes skip forward within news episodes and such when I’m listening, but they’re always queued.
“Quick hits” is a Pocket Casts list of any podcast that’s 10 minutes or less. Some of my podcasts intersperse short and long episodes, and rather than thinking about it too much I just have a list of the things that will be quick.
“Everything else” is almost everything else. It’s everything that’s not a special-purpose podcast. For example, I have “Boring Books For Bedtime” in my list. Good for insomnia, but not something I want to be thinking about listening to mid-day. Same for a meditation podcast, and a history podcast that has about 300 episodes I’m working through. None of them need to be in my list of things to think about - I go find them when I want them. 
2 Likes
In the scenario that I added a new Podcast and wanted to start at the beginning I would temporarily create a new Playlist with the new podcast(s) I’d added and play catchup in that temp playlist. When I’m close enough to caught up, I’d add that Podcast to the main playlist.
In your scenario, I would allocate the podcast you’re behind on into the Low Priority of the main playlist so I don’t lose visibility, and then at the right time (e.g. an extra long dog walk, a long distance drive) I would start playing they from the Podcast’s own screen.
I recently got very behind on 99% Invisible and Cautionary Tales, So I decided for a week that on my evening walk I’d pick whichever backlog was longer and listen to that. I soon got down to less than 15 episodes of each, and over 10 hours in the car this weekend got back to about 3 of each behind.
I am using Apple Podcasts (transcription and sync across devices cannot be beaten, IMHO), and I queue up like 5-6 episodes if I am going to be doing chores around the house. Minimal phone interaction time is key. Of course, I have Stations in Apple Podcasts that sort shows by oldest to newest, grouped by show. If I happen to run out on the iPhone, I will launch the Podcasts app on Apple Watch and go to one of my two stations and pick an episode from the Watch.
1 Like
