I always have captions on shows/movies because I can’t ‘hear’ the dialogue without them. I understand and retain text much faster than audio. My brain creates a scrolling image – lines of text – of whatever’s being said when I’m in a conversation or listening to a recording. It’s easier and faster for me to read than listen, because for some reason my brain wants to convert verbal to written before it processes the meaning. 🤷‍♀️ I don’t know why.

But a lot of people I’m interested in cover topics I care about solely on podcasts.

So I have a little method for listening to podcasts without listening to podcasts.

For most people, it will be unnecessary and irritating and probably inefficient. For the folks who related to what I described, though, it might be helpful? Makes a big difference for me.

  1. I go to the episode page and download the episode.
  2. Upload it to a transcription service (I use Otter.ai).
  3. Get the audio transcribed.
  4. Use CTRL+F to find keywords and skip to the particular parts of the transcription I’m interested in.
  5. Highlight and make notes (Otter.ai has nice sidebar tools for this).
  6. I can then copy-paste my highlights/notes to wherever I need them. It’s easy to link to the episode page noting relevant timestamp if I want to share a highlight or thought (because ATTRIBUTION, always!).

Also, kudos to podcasters who publish the transcript on the episode page. Saves me a step.