Filling most or all of my available listening time with podcasts has its downsides, and I clearly start to notice that after a while.
Listening to people is great, possibly even a top five activity for me, but focused listening to people saying interesting things is a bit limiting in its own way. No matter how much I would like it to, active listening does not let my mind wander much, nor does it combine with doing anything very creative. As a result, podcasts are a poor way to collect my thoughts. They sure work well for delaying thoughts, but that is rarely what I need.
I probably could pick up more varied content, find more things for different moods and so on. But I have picked what I want because I enjoy it and want to hear it. I do not want to make a regimen out of podcasts, nor find more stuff as some kind of light filler.
What I really should do is, of course, put on some music a lot more often. Because I find it easy to spend hours listening and sitting around or doing light chores yet coming out of it not a single step closer to processing whatever was on my mind before I started. Incessant listening can be as much a distraction as anything else.
Some favourites
Yes, my tastes move in quite narrow circles.
- Bitsplitting is a great developer interview show.
- Accidental tech podcast is probably the one I would bring with me to a desert island. I followed both Marco Arment's Build and analyze and John Siracusa's Hypercritical, and when they both ended semi-simultaneously and their hosts started a car podcast together with Casey Liss I almost started listening to that one just because I wanted to hear more from them. Fortunately they could not keep from Apple and related technology and Accidental tech podcast soon emerged as its own show from their pre- and post car technology talk. I also tend to pick up (m)any episodes of other podcasts in which Marco or John appear.
- Back to work will probably confuse you for some time if you know nothing about Merlin Mann. It may confuse you even more as the first thirty minutes or so can be considered pre-show warmup talk. It will be random, it may be hard to follow, it often concerns comics. Then, things will gradually morph into talk about work and life, all the various connections between the two and how to get some kind of grip around it all.
- The talk show is - just like Daring fireball - about whatever interests John Gruber. Anything new related to Apple is highly likely to appear, as is various drinks, movies and a side of baseball.
- Instacast is what I use to listen. At the very moment I use it on my iPad - carrying it around like some retro-futuristic boombox - as Instacast gets into a push notification dialog loop on iOS 7. Take heed kids, you have nothing to complain about if a developer beta makes things go boom.
- Edge cases is the very techiest of my Apple technology shows. I am not sure why I persisted with it as I found it a bit dry and hard to follow in the beginning (I felt like I was losing entire episodes to drifting thoughts and dozing off), but persist I did and when I have enough focus I can really enjoy listening to the dive into whichever more or less esoteric framework or technology constitutes the subject of the current episode.
- Bonus mentions to Core intuition and Identical cousins.