Entertaining your idle brain through your oft noise-polluted ears during otherwise useless parts of your day is, indeed, audio books’ most obvious and attractive feature. Think about it; reclaiming used time is quite the hack. Once I realized this fact, routine traffic jams no longer brought out my inner leadfoot and Mr. Hyde is kept in check while waiting in line at the bank. At first, I found myself reading exclusively fun stuff, which was…, well, fun. It wasn’t until I read my first self-development book that I realized that I could be personally productive. I started to pay more attention to what I filled my ears with and tried to balance between fiction and non-fiction. One day, after completing about 20 books, I realized I had no account of what I had read, nor what I found interesting about each book. Why did this bother me? Well, we all know the saying, “What gets measured gets _____.” You could fill in the blank with things like ‘better’, ‘organized’, or for the cautiously tautological folk, ‘gauged’. So I started logging how long each book was, when I read it, and what my thoughts were. Even with that much information, the best I could do was recommend books to other people. It wasn’t until I made a spreadsheet and some bar graphs representing which genres I was reading that I was able to make use of my reading habits. Balancing the bars became a little goal for me. “Oh look”, I would say to nobody in particular, “the science-fiction bar is racing upwards.” I would want to pump up one of the non-fiction bars; but which one? One time I said, again, aloud, to nobody in particular, “The self-development’s bar is looking stumpy dag-nabit, I’m going to read one of those new-fangled books like ‘Getting Things Done’.” Though I may have since gone overboard by tagging up all my reading and building a webpage that lets me dynamically measure my reading habits, it really helps in finding my next book. Whenever you’re developing a skill, be it running, learning to fly a plane, or developing one’s self, logging is one of the best tools to reach goals, to understand what you want to achieve, and even to marvel at your accomplishments thus far (marveling tends to encourage one to reach even more goals!). If you do decide to reclaim the ticks of the clock by having books read to you, I encourage you to keep track of what you’re reading and actively select books based on what you’ve been reading. In Summary:
Reclaim precious time by ‘reading’ audio books You may find it calms the nerves while waiting Reading can be entertaining and good for you Log and measure what you read Make sure you’re reading what you want Stroke your ego by reviewing your progress, it can be motivational Log anything you want to improve Spreadsheets are you allies I’d be happy to help, advise, and even rant to anybody who’s looking to get into audio books :)
Hack on! — Maulik Lifehack.org Note: If you are interested in Audio Books, make sure go and read another article, Save Time and Add Value with Audio Books – Part 1.
