Imagine you’re in an amusement park with the most fantastic rides. Each ride offers you a thrilling experience. And you want to experience them all.
But… you just have 30 mins. That’s time to enjoy only one. You’re not sure when you’re going to visit the park next. Maybe the next time the same rides won’t be there.
That’s how it feels like when I’m on Youtube. There are so many great videos to watch, each one looks thrilling to watch and open up opportunities in my life.
But darn… I don’t have the time. And I can’t watch them all. If I leave the page I may not see them again.
And even if I add them to the “Watch Later” list, it just keeps growing and growing, and I never get to it.
The Solution? Create a Private ‘Hear-It-Later’ Podcast
Have you heard of read-it-later apps? Some of the popular ones are Pocket & Instapaper. They allow you to save articles on the web to read it later.
What if there was something similar for audio & video content? Imagine an easy way to save the audio or video, so that you can hear it when you have more time & in the right mood.
I’m not aware of any app that does this, but I’ve created my own workflow using the power of podcasts.
Here’s how it works…
When I’m on my desktop, with just 2 clicks I can save any video or audio on the web to my own private podcast as an episode. As I do this regularly, I end up with a curated list of episodes from YouTube Videos & Podcasts that I want to hear later. It’s like my own radio station with all the best talks.
When do I hear them? The perfect time for me is when I’m commuting. I spend anywhere between 1 to 1.5 hours driving every day and there’s nothing much I can do. So the best use of my time is to open up my personal podcast and play the episodes that resonate with me at that moment.
Now, before I show you how to create your own private hear-it-later podcast, I’d like to share why it’s useful to have one:
5 Reasons to Create a ‘Hear-it-Later’ Podcast
- Overcome FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Once you know you can always revisit interesting videos on the web at a time convenient to you, it helps to overcome FOMO.
- Zero Lag. Instant access. As the episodes are downloaded and available offline, you can hear it where you are at 1.5x or 2x the speed.
- Match Content with Mood If you’re regularly saving things you want to hear later, you can choose to hear what matches your mood. This has the highest chances of retention & usefulness.
- Smooth Transitions When I’m watching a video online, I’m always concerned about leaving it halfway. Will I get back to it? But that concern doesn’t come with podcasts. It’s designed for the listener to easily drop & pick up from where they left off.
- Focus on What Matters Most: By looking at your episode list after a waiting period, it creates a space between wanting to hear it and actually hearing it. That space creates a clearer perspective and confidence to decide what is worth hearing and what to eliminate.
Steps to Create Without Technical Knowledge
Here are the tools you’ll need:
- JustCast (a free alternative is huffduffer). This app creates a private podcast of the files saved in your Dropbox folder.
- Dropbox
- Wondershare Uniconvertor (or Xilisoft YouTube Converter): To convert Videos on the web to Mp3 files
- Any Podcast Player for your Phone. I use Overcast.
Here’s a visual depiction of how it works together:
How to set it up?
Here’s a breakdown of the steps:
- Create a Dropbox account and install it on your computer.
- Register with JustCast (or huffduffer). Link JustCast with your Dropbox account. This will create a folder “Justcast” under the “apps” folder of Dropbox.
- Create a subfolder in Justcast. The name you give to the folder, will be the name of your podcast. I called mine “Ali Podcast feed.”
- In your Justcast account you’ll see a link to the RSS feed.
- Add this feed to your podcast player. I use Overcast on my iPhone.
- Download UniConverter
- When you install UniConverter, change the setting to save converted files to your new podcast folder under JustCast.
- You’re all set! Test it out.
- As soon as you see a YouTube video that you’d like to watch, copy the URL & paste it into UniConverter under the “Download” tab:
- It’ll automatically download, convert and add an episode to your private podcast.
Try it out
With this system in place, whenever I’m browsing YouTube and see cool videos to watch, or podcast to hear, in just 2 clicks I save it in my podcast folder.
When I’m in my car, I’ve got the best stuff to listen to curated for me.
This saves me time from watching useless videos, I become free from FOMO and make the best use of my travel time.
Try it out and let me know in the comments how it goes for you.
I believe our work should be an expression of our most creative selves. I work with business owners and their teams to achieve stress-free productivity.