⛏️ Unlocking podcast gold with this tool

Since podcasts became a “thing”, I’ve gotten some amazing gold nuggets from them.

However, they can be very time consuming and I don’t always have 3 hours to spare to listen to a full episode to find the 2 or 3 pieces of information that could really benefit me.

What to do?

I’ve got a few ideas, a new tool that I’m using, and wanted to share how you can get to those gold nuggets with 10% of the time needed.

How I Learned From Podcasts

I can’t say that I pick things up from podcasts in a “linear” fashion.

That is, there’s value in listening to episodes fully when I have the time, or listening to a new podcast that I haven’t heard before.

But - most of the time I’m not riding in the car with hours to kill or flying somewhere (also with hours to kill).

Once I’ve found a podcast that I know is high signal to noise and subscribed to it, I like to have a way to quickly see what the episode is about and what details they get into.

This is similar to what I’ve done with Summarily for automatically summarizing (with timestamps) new videos from YouTube channels I subscribe to.

Until now, I hadn’t seen a good podcast tool that broke down the episode beyond offering an overall summary, so I would typically look at show notes, read comments, or go by what the host laid out in the beginning.

Then, when listening to the episode I would take some notes by hand, or switch to Roam, or even ClickUp, to add a quick note or reminder to go back and look more deeply into something, implement an idea, etc.

I had also used Momento to grab a transcript of the past 5-30ish seconds of a podcast using their simple grab feature and sent that to Readwise…but that wasn’t always enough.

Ok, so that’s what worked, or kind of worked, or didn’t work so well.

I recently came across a tool that I started using about a month ago and it’s worked its way quickly into my information / note taking workflow - Podwise.

Recommended

How I’m Learning (Quickly) From Podcasts Now

I’m going to do a quick brain dump of features that help you quickly grab information from podcasts that Podwise has so that this doesn’t turn into a novel…I’m also including my first look video of Podwise below the bullets - check it out.

• Summarization (of course!)

• Outline - summaries of short sections that are linked to that point in the podcast audio and transcript

• Full transcript

• Mindmap - great for the visual thinkers

• Keywords with definitions

• Ability to send to note taking / aggregating services like Readwise Reader, Notion, etc

How do I use these features to get more out of podcasts?

I can go into an episode that looks interesting and check the overall summary to make sure it matches with my expectations / interests. This takes about 30 seconds and saves me from listening to an episode that might not be “for me” as well as giving me a rough idea where in the episode the information I’m really interested in might be.

Next, I can go into the outlines and find the sections I want, click to expand the notes to look at the bullets, and play that part of the audio so that I can hear exactly what they have to say.

If the episode is a keeper as far as taking notes or having important information to save is concerned, I just click on the send button and have it sent over to my Readwise Reader inbox.

From there I can add highlights and notes as needed and have it automatically sent off to my notes in Roam Research (you can of courses send to many places from Readwise).

I’m really looking forward to having a more systematic way of gathering good information from podcasts - there’s no way to stay on top of them all (for now…), but this will let me keep up with the podcasts I really enjoy or find high quality with missing out on much fewer gold nuggets moving forward.

If you are also interested in getting great information from podcasts to help improve your business, personal life, or just have favorites that you want to keep up I highly suggest checking out Podwise and seeing if it’s a good fit.

Extra Extra

• We all know water is important for maintaining our focus and…life…but did you know how it actually works?

• Not sure which daily planner app to use? Francesco has you covered in this video.

One quick question 👋

I love hearing from readers, and I’m always happy to hear feedback from active subscribers. How am I doing with the Productivity Academy newsletter? Is there any content you’d like to see more or less of? Which parts of the newsletter (or articles, or podcast) do you enjoy the most?

Hit reply and say hello, happy to hear from you!

P.S. The timing couldn’t have been better. I just bought an annual account at Podwise - they’re celebrating their launch with a 35% discount if you use the code “LAUNCH”. Crazy good deal - that’s on top of the annual discount.