No Podcasts for Seven Days

The older I get the more I understand how deep many of the habits of my life are engrained. I quit chewing tobacco a little over a decade ago, much to the satisfaction of my wife, after coming to the realization that it was a habit that negatively impacted my life more than in just the most obvious health related ways. Ever since then, I have worked to be aware of all my habits. The bad ones and the good ones.

I don’t claim to be the first person to listen to a podcast, but shortly after Apple started supporting them in iTunes (who remembers iTunes???) I was hooked. I immediately thought of the potential to have talk radio (a la NPR) on demand. And the medium went on to change my life in so many profound ways. But those are stories for another post.

And in the spirit of trying to find ways to flex my “do hard stuff” muscle, I decided to quit listening to podcasts for a week. Yes, an entire week. All seven days! I realize that many (most?) people never listen to podcasts, but many parts of my day, my week, my life are built around what show comes out when. I enjoy many different genres of podcasts, but probably spend 30% of my listening time learning things and another 30% hearing interesting stories, with the rest being a mishmash of current events and news shows.

It is possible that I’ve not gone a single day without listening to a podcast since mid-2005. I did not expect this week to be easy. But then again, it was only seven days.

My first step was to remove the Overcast app from my phone. Thankfully, I didn’t delete it, just removed it. My muscle memory is strong for podcasts, and I would have been two shows in before I realized what I was doing.

No great big reveal here. It was a fine week. After then end of the week, I only went back and listened to one show that I missed during the week (NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me).

I did “fall behind” a little in my news consumption. I don’t spend a lot of time following the general news anyway, but I had to be a little more deliberate to catch up on a couple of times during the week.

I follow a lot of technology podcasts, and under normal circumstances I would have heard a hundred mentions of Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ event in the week before it, but I didn’t know anything about it until the night before. My life was not measurably any worse for not knowing.

My one-week experiment of depriving myself of listening to podcasts made me more aware of the things I do (from my morning routine, to driving, to exercising, to so much more) that are impacted by what podcast I’m listening to. Also, I now have no guilt for not listening to every second of every episode of all my favorite podcasts. I would need to take a year-long sabbatical from work (and likely the rest of my life) if I was to ever make a significant dent in my to-listen playlist in Overcast, and I’m good with that. Life is too short to worry that I won’t listen to them all (or read all the books or watch all the shows).