How to learn without putting off your daily activities
The auto-suggested paths that can change your learning and have the potential of being your Portable University.
We jump into the treadmill and set 20 min. The most boring 20 min ever. We spend 30 commuting every single day to get to the office. We wait in lines wondering “how much slower it can be?”. We take the bus, look through the window and realize our life is passing by those unusable moments.
During the day, there are segments between activities we throw away. Even during some activities, there is time we give away!
Now and again we are possessed by our habits. We don’t let new learning paths or even new people or media to influence us.
You know it would be great to study over a new field on your career, read into a situation that bothers you, expand your knowledge about new technologies or self-improvement.
Within our dead time situations we can address new ways of learning.
There might be at least 2 hours of your day you can take advantage of. Think of waiting moments, transfers, mandatory pauses, automatic activities (like driving or walking).
The focus here is in our ears. This magical sense can operate while doing a low-energy activity or an unconscious one. Essentially, you can listen to people that speak about a topic. What if we could turn these useless moments into our actual University?
We can auto-suggest these topics for our convenience and channel knowledge.
The key is to identify those moments and have the material ready to play.
To set this up and find a successful habit, we must prepare the equipment that will be with us all the time.
Tools we always have
Simply smartphone and headphones. These two alone can bring hours of knowledge to our dead moments.
If we are into audio quality and we want a vast library, we should download Audible’s app or Libro.fm which will bring numerous audiobooks to choose. Of course, they have a monthly fee (15USD), but it worths it. On the bright side, you can return your books and get the credits back to exchange for some other book of interest once you finished it. This is an excellent feature since you can endlessly get books.
You can also have free options using Audiobooks.com for iPhone or Free Audiobooks on Google Play for Android. They have +8000 (fundamentally classics) free titles!
Another astounding free option is Podcasts. Duh.
Nowadays everyone knows, but I need to highlight the potential for these to be your academic system. You find people speaking about interesting topics, debating, interacting with communities, finding specific general & absurd amounts of knowledge for free.
Apps like Spotify, Castro Google Podcasts or my personal best Overcast allow us to listen to millions of hours of knowledge.
Similarly to listening to the radio in the car or at work, we could use podcasts to focus on a particular topic we want to learn. Comparatively, we read books only in our free time or that which we assign to study something. We could listen to the same books on any other useless time instead.
What is needed:
- Useless moments in between activities
- Headphones and smartphone
- Library of valuable titles
- Done. Now you’re packed with a portable university.
Listening to information allow us to keep moving, continue with our unthinking tasks and integrate them into our habits to make them more efficient and interesting.
