How to cut your audio learning to half the time

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to a number of different podcasts and am one of those people who have to listen to it from the very first episode.  However, I don’t actually have much time to listen.  I have started to plug my phone in to my car to listen on the way to and from work, much better than inane commercial radio, and I listen when I go out for a lunchtime walk.  The chances are I will never catch up. I’m not really the sort that can listen whilst working.  When I listen, I want to listen.

In 2010 tech blog GigaOm suggested “speed-listening to podcasts” as an overall time-saving technique.  This involved resetting the playback speed.  I was new to podcasts and didn’t know that my podcast player had such a function until my daughter told me about it.  She listens to podcasts and audio books all the time. I can’t recall if I figured out how to change the setting myself or just passed her the phone to do it.  The upshot is now that I listen to things at 1.5 speed. 

This makes for interesting listening.  With some podcasts the narrator is slow talking so 1.5 times faster doesn’t actually sound that bad at all.  Others, where the narrator talks quickly anyway, just sound like their rattling along and you barely have time to distinguish the words.  The intro music and any adverts that are part of the podcast can sound quite distorted at that speed to which is a bit off putting, so just as well I found the Forward 30 Seconds button.  I skip through all that to get back to the content.  There are some apps that will actively cut out white noise, intros and outros as well.  I don’t know if mine does that, I might have to hand it to my daughter to figure out!

Even at 1.5 speed I still won’t ever catch up with the number of episodes that are in my queue. 

I had a bit of a clear out recently.  There are podcasts that I’ve listened to for over a year now and to be honest, they are starting to sound a bit samey.  There were others that I’d downloaded and only ever listened to one or two episodes so clearly, I was never overly bothered by then.  I had also downloaded a load of episodes from podcasts on businessy type areas and have never got around to listening to those either, so they got removed.  There were others that sounded like a good idea at the time, but I no longer feel the same about the content. 

I have probably removed about half of the 300+ queued episodes.  Still a lot to get through.