Podcasting the great outdoors

Podcasts have been a major part of my life for 15 years now. In the mid-2000s, I got familiar with the painful process of downloading them to my Mac, and then transferring them to my iPod to listen to on the go. In these pre-Bluetooth days, I was reliant on a cassette adaptor to play them in my car.

And it was still wonderful. I could use my walks, my commutes and my gardening time to keep learning and hearing about the things I cared about. Once I started with podcasts, I’ve never found a reason to stop, even during the “slump years” of the last 2000s and early 2010s. I’ve been writing about podcasts — on and off — since 2006.

These days, it’s all about the iPhone and the AirPods, but podcasting is still a through line in my life. It’s very rare that I go through a whole day without listening to at least one of them.

I make a very conscious choice to change up my listening at the weekends, though. Rather than just continuing to listen to the same digital media/journalism/tech shows that define my working life, I try to switch to a mix of outdoors and comedy podcasts.

Weekend soundscape for relaxation

The bane of digital life is that it’s hard to escape work, especially when you are self-employed and thus have no real sense of “end of the work day”. For my own mental health, I’ve tried to disconnect from the mainstream of my work at weekends, and changing my soundscape helps that.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been building a weekend podcast playlist for myself. After I accidentally started crowd-sourcing a big list of journalism (and journalism-related) podcasts over on my work blog, I thought I’d take the time to build my own list of recommendations for nature and outdoor podcasts here.

And here it is: Outdoors Podcasts Recommendations

I hope you find it useful - and let me know if you have any recommendations.