Listen immediately or "save up"?

[Gary]

With Thanksgiving coming up here in the US, I find myself squirreling away my new podcasts - bracing myself for the loooong car trips I will be taking while visiting relatives.
So I was wondering who else might do this?

[Fenrix]

I listen to enough different podcasts and I still have enough of the PC and EP backlogs to keep my queue full that I don't have to worry about running out. I do stories on commutes and talky podcasts while working around the yard.

I assemble special lists for road trips. After my normal consuption, I pull aside the stories that the wife would enjoy (and I would enjoy again) into a separate folder for later use.

My current commitmen is I consume all the EA podcasts the same year they are published. Well, I'm usually finishing December in January, but that's still in plenty of time to fully participate in the Best of the Year discussions.

[Listener]

I listen right when they come in.

If you need stuff to backfill during long drives, there's a LOT of short fiction podcasts out there. StarShipSofa, Tales to Terrify, Dunesteef, and Drabblecast are the four that come to mind.

Outside of that...

If you don't read his blog or books, download and binge on Wil Wheaton's Radio Free Burrito. And there's more than 340 issues of the Geologic Podcast.

[matweller]

I have 30ish podcast subscriptions that I listen to at work through the day and in my 20-minutes-each-way commute in whatever strikes my mood. Although, since there are 125 episodes in my 'unplayed' cue and only one of them in an episode of an EA show, that should give you an indication of how often the mood strikes me to listen to ours.

[Windup]

When I play an episode of any podcast depends heavily on length.

It's pretty easy to work a 3-30 minute podcast in as part of house chores, walking or other exercise, and I have a Smart Playlist of those that turns over pretty quickly.  I like Escape Pod so well that I typically play it in the first block of "listening time" long enough to finish the episode.  I'm not quite as fastidious about PodCastle.

For podcasts of an hour or more, I generally save those for road trips and other extended listening opportunities.  Because there are quite a few podcasts I like at that length, and not many opportunities, it can be weeks or months before I get around to playing them.

[eytanz]

I like listening to the episodes as they come out. But I'm also prefer to listen to them in order. So if I fall behind one week and don't get a chance to listen to the episode before the next one comes out, I end up with a backlog. At the moment, the backlog for each of the three EA podcasts stands at 3, a bit better than last month where I was about 5 episodes behind for each...

[Tobias E. Queen]

I guess as soon as they download (technically?)

I don't actually download them though, I stream them. I usually just make a quick playlist of unlistened to episodes on my android phone using my PodCatcher of choice BeyondPod (YMMV), then click play on my playlist and they stream over my data connection on my phone while I do anything of the physical labor type stuff we all find ourselves doing from time to time, like doing dishes, yard work, crafting infernal devices of varying degrees of effectiveness, you know, husbandly chores and such.

[Leslianne]

I have an mp3 player that I fill up with all the various podcasts I listen to. When I've gone all the way through it, I empty it and fill it up again with the things I've downloaded since the last fill up. This usually puts me about 2-6 episodes behind Escape Pod proper, though more this winter, since it's been too wet to go on all-day hikes.