Throughout my entire life, I’ve been late to the game in most of the things I experience. I’m always the last to read, watch, or hear about something, and all of my free time is spent playing catch up.

I’ve done the math. And I’m going to try to catch up by 2018.

It’s pretty daunting. I have five or six podcasts I want to listen to, and three books I want to be finished with at the end of the year. Four, if I make good time. But it’s going to take a lot.

Before I give you the numbers, let me just say that this is all free time. This is after school, work, writing, and D&D. For podcasts, it means listening in the car or when I’m playing video games by myself. So this is time I’m already going to have to be pushing for.

The worst part is, most of these podcasts have been running for years. Writing Excuses, for example, may only have fifteen minute long episodes, but the episodes are weekly, and the podcast has been running since 2008.

So, here are the numbers. In order to be caught up with all of these podcasts by the end of the year (minus the time I’ve already put into it, of course,) this is how many hours per week I need to put into it. This is also the order of priority I’m putting into this effort.

• Critical Role — 15 hours
• Writing Excuses — 2 hours
• Voice Acting Mastery — 2.5 hours
• Story Break — 3 hours
• CoolGames Inc. — 3.5 hours
• Hello Internet — 10 hours

Now, because there’s a lot of content, but I’m not super into it, let’s just take off Hello Internet from these numbers. I do want to get to it, but I don’t plan on trying to get caught up any time soon. So without that, that’s about 26 hours per week of podcast. Doable, if I try really hard. (Plus, it’s worth noting that I can obviously just focus on one podcast, but I like the idea of tackling them all simultaneously so I don’t burn myself out on just one.)

That said, Critical Role 15 hours per week? That’s pretty much one episode a day. I really want to be caught up, but I don’t know if I can do it. Besides that, by my calculations, the entire month of December would be spent watching episodes that don’t even exist yet! This wouldn’t take nearly as long if they just stopped production to wait for me.

A (very) rough estimate of the total amount of time I would need to be caught up right now is about 500 hours, and that isn’t counting future episodes that haven’t aired. As of writing this on Monday, between now and the end of the year is about 2800 hours. I would need to be listening to podcasts for about 17.5% of the time (again, only counting current episodes).

I don’t think that’ll be possible, because it’s too much to get through in a small period of time. But really, all I need to do is go through content faster than it is released. So while I’m perfectly aware that being caught up with everything by 2018 is an insane notion, I hope the aspiration will make the process go much more quickly.