Add More Podcasts to Your Day With This Calculator
I used to listen to an unreasonable amount of podcasts – usually every day on the way from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, a process that required long walks and long waiting for trains. But the pandemic changed everything. I’ve been working from home since March, and I currently have just as much time on my daily commute as it takes to load Slack. However, I still subscribe to 44 podcasts and have 29 episodes in the queue. When will I find time to listen to them all?
There is a new tool that can answer this question for me, and if you are just as preoccupied with podcasts (and chances are you are ), it can also help you cram them into the holes in your head. The Podcast Calculator is hosted on the Omni Calculator website, which is designed to help people understand the world using one of over a thousand custom calculation tools. This one, developed by physicist Stephen Wooding, PhD in mathematics Maciej Kowalski and Omni’s Farhan Khan, is designed to help you “kill dead time” by identifying and quantifying the time of day when you are not doing anything too mentally exhausting and thus potentially can listen to a podcast at the same time. Steven Woodworker seems like the perfect guy to ask about how to listen to more podcasts. In an email, he told us that he had been a fan of this media outlet for over ten years and listened to them for a total of about 259 days , according to his own estimate. (His first podcast wasThis Week in Tech , and his all-time favorite is The Infinite Monkey Cage from the BBC.) Wooding listens to podcasts “while walking, driving, washing dishes [and] mowing the lawn,” he said. said. “I even listen to podcasts sometimes, which are designed to put you to sleep.”
“Recently, my teammates created an audiobook calculator [that works] in a similar way,” Wooding said. “I immediately thought it would be much cooler if we replaced books with podcasts about everything under the sun. Audiobooks are, of course, a longer audio format, and [and taking the time to listen to] something shorter, educational and inspiring might just be what people need [in 2020]. “
And that’s where the Podcast Calculator can help you. Having a large number of episodes to listen to will help you work through them by identifying not only the times of the day when you can listen, but it will also help you gauge how mentally involved you are during your period. “Dead time”. You can then figure out how long it will take you to watch an episode (or package of episodes) and choose the best one for the activity.
Using a fairly simple set of menus and boxes, you’ll note your average time spent traveling or doing chores, record the average length of the episode (s) of the show (s) you listen to, and note how much you need to focus as you listen – which basically means how often you might need to go back to hide what you missed. The calculator will then tell you how much dead time you could fill with podcasts and how many episodes you can listen to on average per week, month, or year. Episode queue of Hello From the Magic Tavern , a supremely silly podcast of Dungeons & Dragons- themed comedy improvisations. I have about 160 episodes that I can listen to, and each episode is usually 50 minutes to an hour long. If I assume I have one hour of “dead time” per day during which I am doing chores and I assume that I can mostly focus on my listening while doing them, the Podcast Calculator tells me that I I can finish my riotous audition in 7-1 / 2 months.
Since I’m a truly angry person ( at least people love to tell me about this on the internet ), I often listen to podcasts at 1.5x or faster, and of course there will be new episodes every week, but the calculator doesn’t this. I do not include these additional variables. [ Update: The day after this article was published, Wooding changed the calculator to include a listening speed setting. Thanks Steve! ] However, if you want more podcasts in your life, you can now easily calculate how many podcasts will fit.