Here’s the workflow I’m currently using. It uses the Pocket Casts app and an email utility called Mail Notes. Mail Notes lets you setup a single email address that you will send messages to. This speeds up the emailing process because you don’t need to enter a target email when sending a message. I also have a dedicated gmail address for all the notes I mail to myself. I do this so I don’t have to wade through extraneous emails in my inbox. I treat this as a holding pen for jotting quick ideas to myself that I will later flesh out and organize.
Here are the steps:
Pause the podcast.
Display the “Now Playing” screen. This screen shows the podcast name, podcast episode and time location in the episode.
Take a screenshot.
Click on the onscreen screenshot thumbnail.
Click on the sharing button and select Mail Notes (which has been set as a favorite sharing option so I don’t have to scroll).
This opens a modal window you can type a short note into and send to a predesignated email address (no need to enter the destination email with the Mail Notes app since it only sends messages to a single location).
Delete the screenshot.
Cumbersome? Yes, especially when exercising. But, it’s better than listening to a podcast, hearing something really interesting and then wracking my brain later desperately trying to recall it.
What all of this really points to is how nascent the podcasting space still is. The tooling is still underdeveloped. I’ve already highlighted the issues with podcast discovery in another post, but annotations are another (don’t get me started on podcast community and user dialogue, that’s a third area that is woefully untapped). Hopefully these shortcoming will be addressed someday by clever entrepreneurs. In the meantime, enthusiasts like me will employ our suboptimal, but practical workarounds.
Update: I have posted a new article on this topic that looks at iOS apps with podcast note-taking capabilities: More Solutions for Taking Podcast Notes: An App Overview.