In a previous post I talked about how I really love podcasts. I’ve been a heavy consumer of podcasts over the past decade, and they are a main form of staying in touch with current events, news, pop culture, and in depth dives into fascinating areas of design and history. (And true crime. Yes, I like my murder podcasts too.) In fact, there have been few days in the past decade that I haven’t listened to at least one podcast. Now I use Obsidian and Overcast to keep a podcast log.
Podcasts are great! They can be entertaining, educational, relaxing, informative, engaging… it’s a great way to learn something new or stay current on world events while walking the dog or washing the dishes.
The problem is that listening to podcasts can become an act of passive media consumption. Just like bingeing the latest series du jour on Netflix is, it becomes too easy to listen to the next episode without reflecting or engaging with the content you’ve just consumed.
It can be a fire hose of content, which makes it tough, especially when you want to recommend or share interesting episodes with others. For instance, in a grad school seminar last semester, we were discussing the lasting traumas of racial injustice in bioethics and medical research. The conversation reminded me of a 2010 episode of Radiolab about Henrietta Lacks, which I thought would be a good introduction for anyone who hadn’t heard of the previously hidden past of HeLa cells.
The episode features the search for answers between Lacks’ daughter, Deborah, and Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010). The episode had stuck with me for over a decade because of Lacks’s story and Radiolab’s engaging use of audio storytelling. I would have loved to have a running (and searchable!) log that I could have pulled a reference to share with colleagues on the fly.
Enter the Resonance Calendar
I had first heard about resonance calendars from a chat on the Obsidian Community Discord. In short, a resonance calendar is a log of media you’ve engaged with, and a few short words about what interested you about the media. Ali Abdaal came up with the term, and discusses how he uses Notion to be able to record what resonates for him.
I’ll talk more in another post about how I use Obsidian as my daily log, and an easy way to create my own media log, similar to the resonance calendar in Notion. I’ll also talk about how I use the Dataview plugin to easily create log files and create quick searches for topics and information in my Obsidian vault.
My first pass at logging interesting content in Obsidian was a miserable failure… but also really helpful. The reason it didn’t work was that it created too much friction to generate a note, even with a template and some automation. I would run a Siri Shortcut for each podcast episode or YouTube video that resonated, generating a new note in my inbox. However, there was too much manual processing for something that I only really wanted to write a few lines about. Unprocessed episode notes were stacking up and sitting unprocessed in my inbox at an unsustainable rate.
That’s why I switched to treating “resonance” as individual lines in my daily notes. It keeps the process lightweight so that I can easily add new podcasts on the fly. (It’s not a total loss, though. The old template has become my podcast reference note template when want to capture more about a particular episode. It allows more discoverability with search and Dataview.)
Creating a daily podcast log
My daily note serves as both an active daily workspace, but also as a record of my activities, thoughts, and content during the day. It’s a tool that allows me to plan, record, and retrieve information. (But more on that in another post.)
One of the things I log is which podcasts I’ve listened to, and any quick keywords or related thoughts in a bulleted list. My biggest challenge is that I’ll often listen to podcasts at times when I can’t make notes, but at least I can jot down the ideas or tag them to come back to.
I use two Obsidian plugins to make this Shortcut work:
I created a Shortcut that grabs the current episode information from Overcast’s now playing screen and appends it to the bottom of my daily note. The episode information gets prepended with log-podcast:: as a key that I can use with the Dataview plugin.
This means that log-podcast:: [[Podcast Title]] – Episode Title [(link)](URL) gets automatically added to my daily note, giving me the podcast and episode name, as well as an episode link in Markdown.
The shortcut makes use of an iOS and macOS app called Drafts. Drafts is a really powerful text utilities app that’s available for free, and features a number of additional power features with Drafts Pro. (If you’re reading this in April 2022, it’s available for 75% off for your first year.) If you don’t want to use Drafts, you could modify the shortcut to copy the text to the clipboard, so you can paste it into your daily note in Obsidian. Or you could update it to use the append feature from the Advanced URI plugin.
For every podcast I listen to, I keep a general show note about the series. The episode title stays as raw text, but gets linked to a reference note if I wind up taking a more detailed note after-the-fact.
There’s one caveat: make sure your daily note is synced to your iOS device before running the shortcut. This is a pain in my workflow when I’m grooving to a podcast and instead of just activating the share sheet, I need to launch Obsidian first to make sure it’s up-to-date. It’s not a deal-breaker for me, but just a minor inconvenience.
Using Dataview, this gets turned into a log that lets me see what I’ve listened to recently. It’s a quick way to scan and grab a direct link to the audio file. I find podcasts come up in conversation, whether it’s about the latest current events or an interesting interview about accessibility in digital product design.
