The reason why you are not to listen to what you want when the mood drops because you can not get there fast enough. Whether you know it or not, you are drowning in listening choices. Sound options abound. Often, the time it takes to dig through songs, podcasts, or audiobooks is the thing that prevents us from listening when we decide we want to listen.
I know I thought about putting on soft, background music during a family dinner, but with only two or three minutes between the time I think about it and the timer being off, I gave up hope. Making the perfect playlist is not difficult, but it can take some time. The same goes for finding a new podcast episode or audiobook that can fit the mood as well as a certain listening time. It’s not hard, it just takes time.
Take these few steps now to enable you to listen faster in the future.
Make playlists for many moods
When it’s time to dance, cook, study or sleep, you want to leave the music in line and get ready to go.
Having playlists in a wide variety of moods is the key to sound tracking of those moments and not just starting the first playlist that matches your keyword search. The best way to do this is to add songs and albums to different playlists at the same time as adding them to your music library.
If a song does not fit into an existing playlist, consider making a new song about how the song makes you feel or the time of day you want to listen to it.
Creating dozens of playlists is ideal for very specific moods, but also consider making some very broad ones. For example, simply calling playlists ‘Morning’, ‘Afternoon’ and ‘Evening’ is one way to always have a choice of songs ready. ‘Lay Down’, ‘Up and Around’ and ‘Blood Pump’ are another way to group songs broadly and cover different listening times that will occur in the future.
While you are busy, you should also get rid of the redundant playlist names. Having five lists titled “Good Songs New” later creates indecision and uncertainty. You can also use emoji in playlist titles if you can identify them faster.
Backup Podcast Deliveries
The beauty of listening to podcasts is that there is one for every topic that interests you. There are millions of people, from big budget narratives to casual conversations between friends. The content is great, but it can also be a curse.
Personally, I mostly listen to weekly technology news podcasts. The ones I listen to the most are usually between 45 and 90 minutes. It is the perfect length for my daily run and helps me kill two birds in one stone. Sometimes there were no new episodes available, and that kept me from running the day.
To combat this problem, I liked a few episodes of programs I subscribed to. There are just too many good podcasts and not enough time. If I lose the battle with my occasional listening, I will sign up. It’s nothing personal, but helps maintain my sanity.
But instead of deleting shows in my podcast player, I keep a few episodes off the shows so I always have one available to listen to, even when my regular shows run out for the week. The ones I keep as a backup are evergreen episodes of Revisionist history, Hidden brain, and the TED Radio Hour.
Emergency sounds
There are times that you just need audio. Whether it’s an approaching deadline or simply unexpected moments of tension, sometimes it helps to have background sound. In these cases, it does not matter what the sound is – it just needs to be one tap further.