Advanced Management Skills

How to use the ‘dead time’ in your life productively

Keeping up-to-date in the fast moving world of business, technology and science is a real challenge for busy professionals. Why not download podcasts onto your Gizmo (SmartPhone, iPod or portable media player) and listen to them during your dead time (i.e. travelling or at the gym)? Here’s how to do it:

1. Acquire a suitable media player (I use a Windows SmartPhone with a 2GB microSD card)
2. Install podcast software on your PC – I use the free program ‘Juice’ from http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/
3. Subscribe to podcast feeds by clicking the + button in ‘Juice’ and copying & pasting podcast URLs in. See below for a list of my favourite podcast feeds. For a wide choice you can use the podcast directory built into ‘Juice’ or one of the many podcast search engines available, including ITunes.
4. Go into ‘Preferences’ in ‘Juice’ and choose a directory to download podcasts to (I use c:\temp\podcasts)
5. Download your podcasts into onto your hard drive by clicking the relevant button in ‘Juice’
6. Create a directory on your gizmo (PDA / mobile phone / mp3) player called ‘podcasts’
7. Just before you travel upload your podcasts into this ‘podcasts’ directory on your gizmo
8. Enjoy your podcasts!

My favourite podcast feeds are (copy and paste the URLs into the podcast software on your PC):

1. Peter Day: World of Business (BBC) – http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/worldbiz/rss.xml
2. Peter Day: In Business (BBC) – http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/inbusiness/rss.xml
3. Evan Davis: The Bottom Line (BBC) – http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/bottomline/rss.xml
4. World Technology (BBC) – http://www.theworld.org/rss/tech.xml
5. Digital Planet (BBC) – http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/digitalplanet/rss.xml
6. Scientific American – http://www.sciam.com/podcast/sciam_podcast_r.xml
7. The Economist – http://www.economist.com/media/rss/economist.xml
8. Business Weekly (BBC) – http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/bizweekly/rss.xml

I’ve collected hundreds of hours of these fascinating, useful programmes which I listen to both on the move and on a particularly sadistic cross training machine at the LBS gym.

Share/Bookmark