I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I treat them as kind of drift-in, drift-out background noise. When I'm washing dishes or something I'll listen to every word.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I treat them as kind of drift-in, drift-out background noise. When I'm washing dishes or something I'll listen to every word. But some tasks, like some parts of playing a video game or sorting out the mail or whatever, requires more attention so I'll stop listening for a bit and then drift back in when the task is done. For that reason, I don't listen to "high attention" podcasts, like stories or highly educational shows and audiobooks. Instead I listen to weekly update kind of things (weekly video game podcasts, science news podcasts, guitar Q&A show, etc) where if I zone out for a few minutes, I don't really care because they'll move on to some other topic shortly and I can tune back in.