I think I may have reached my limit with podcasts that I subscribe to.

I mostly listen to them while out walking, so it would have been fine to subscribe to half a dozen that put out an hour or so per week, but some of them are a bit less rigid with their schedule and miss a week or keep taking breaks, so I was adding to subscriptions to make sure I would always have something until it got to the point where there was more content than I could keep up with.

I’m not actually sure whether I have the balance right now because I sometimes discover a new one that has been running for a while and decide to catch up with the backlog. I probably would be able to keep up with new editions now, but I am splitting my time between listening to the new ones and doing some catch-up.

The tactic is that I try and listen to topical podcasts as they come out – like The Bugle, Page 94, Mark Steele’s What The Fuck Is Going On?, Pod Save the UK and What Most People Think with Geoff Norcott. Fortunately these don’t all come out on the same day.

Less topical pods I tend to listen to within a week, before the next one comes out.

I now play podcasts while I am playing Age of Empires and maybe listen to a couple during a game, so keeping up-to-date is just about feasible but that is only because of the sporadic schedule of a couple of them – like The Album Years or the Sonicbond podcast, and the way other pods like Rockonteurs keep taking breaks.

I think I am just about on the right side of the line where something enjoyable just becomes a chore, as long I don’t start subscribing to anything else, so I am now in a similar position to how I am with television. I hear about some new programme and think that I might enjoy it but don’t actually start watching it because I know I won’t have the time to spare for it.

This is all a consequence of me making an effort to read more in the last couple of years. A lot of my spare time is now spent reading and I can’t have the TV or a podcast on them, though I will listen to a record.

I guess what I really need is for the Word magazine people and Richard Herring to stop throwing out multiple podcasts in a week! But in the meantime I have started listening to podcasts at 1.2x speed until I catch up with the backlog.