While there’s something to be said for taking every possible opportunity to sit in absolute silence and stare into the middle distance of a room as your mind wanders over times you embarrassed yourself or made bad decisions in the past, podcasts are an ideal alternative for filling those spaces in the day that aren’t already occupied with other activities. In order to help show how many podcasts you can jam into your life, there’s the Podcast Calculator.
The Calculator is designed, as its site puts it, to take advantage of the “many minutes in our day when we’re doing something but not really doing anything actively.” It calls this “dead time,” and provides examples like commuting, working out, cleaning, or dog-walking. Obviously in the pocket of Big Podcast, the Calculator suggests listening to different shows instead of contemplating the void where our attention span used to be while doing these activities.
It works by asking users to estimate the time they spend doing boring, mindless junk during the day, input the length of a podcast, and choose how focused on the audio they think they’ll be while listening. The Calculator then spits out the number of podcast episodes “you could go through weekly, monthly, and yearly.”
The site’s copy says that the tool is meant to help users “find out how long it would take to learn something new about the world, history, or yourself” by filling their dead time with podcasts. What it doesn’t seem to consider is that we’re much more likely to subscribe to shows exploring the Jeremy Renner app, audio of a cat influencer purring, or tales of people shitting themselves than anything constructive.
Still, if you’d like to give the Podcast Calculator a whirl, check it out over here.
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