Deep Podcast Queue

This seems a little odd, but I can pinpoint the time my podcast queue got out of hand. In December 2007, I had actually underflowed my list. I was running out of things to listen to and by the end of the day, everything downloaded the previous day would have been listened to. In the middle of that month, we took a trip to San Francisco and when I got back I had a queue again. Ever since then, I’ve never been close to caught up again.

In recent months, the queue exceeded 30 days. The shows I were listening to were over a month old by the time I got to them. That’s been pulled in to around 20 days, but it is still pretty substantial. It tends to fluctuate based on how much I have to talk to other people at my day job. When I have long stretches of listening time, I catch up and when I’m in lots of meetings I fall behind.

This weekend actually had an unusual amount of podcast listening time. I crossed a line where I’m listening to shows on a Sunday that were recorded on a Tuesday, so that means I pulled in to the 19 day type backlog. I know some people declare “podcast bankruptcy” when they get way behind on these things, but I like to chug on through. I don’t care so much about the timeliness of the shows. I do bump The Writers Almanac up to the top of my list every day because I do prefer to listen to those closer to their actual time, rather than a month later.

This is why I really dislike it when podcasters make a big deal in their shows of doing a show on a Tuesday when they normally do it on Monday, etc etc. When I get to that episode, whatever time difference they are discussing is long gone. When I mentioned above about shows being recorded on Tuesday, the only reason I know that is because they said so in the show. Even those shows that are on a rigorous weekly schedule, for the most part I can’t remember what that day is. I look forward to the day when I’m listening to these shows closer to their publish time, but for the most part schedule and timing are things that many people say are really important in the podcast world but about which I couldn’t care less.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.