Perfect Combo: Audiobooks & Walking
It took a while to fall in love with audiobooks. Audiobooks seemed like a peasant form of reading books.
The beauty of audiobooks is how efficiently one can absorb information.
Medium sized book takes around 5–8 hours to listen. If you listen to it 1 hour daily at 1.2x speed you can finish it within a week easily. I normally listen between 1.5–2 hours daily. This allows me to listen to 2–3 audiobooks a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less depending on size of the book.
The key isn’t necessarily to listen to a lot of books (although the urge is irresistible), but to actually learn and enjoy the information that you are feeding your brain.
Reading a book demands your attention. Listening to an audiobook demands part of your attention.
That’s not to say that audiobooks can be done while multitasking. Audiobooks demand your mental attention especially if it is dense books, but you are more free in the mode that you can digest the information.
You can drive, walk, run, and maybe even swim..
My favorite combination is listening to audiobooks while walking.
I walk between 3.5–4.5 miles a day and that time is spent listening to audiobooks.
Highly recommend walking at least that much daily. It’s important to walk and often. Our society is filled with people that don’t get enough movement in their day. Sitting on their asses all day and sleeping on a comfy bed isn’t great for your body.
During the walks I am teeming with ideas and thinking. The audiobooks add knowledge to this process and make it even more powerful.
My favorite audiobook app is Scribd: https://www.scribd.com
Less than $10 a month to have access to a large and constantly expanding selection of audiobooks.
Depending on my mood I listen to history, biography, and other topics to align well with my present curiosity.
If I stumble upon an idea or hear something of interest from the book then I take notes on my phone. These are brief notes, points of future research.
The downsides to audiobooks is the lack of note taking and annotations, but the upsides far exceed the downsides. If a book requires extensive notes and annotations then I will not listen to it and instead buy the book. OR you can also listen to audiobook while sitting down and having a notebook out. This works great with dense, but short books. (Feels like a college lecture but fun!)
I have diven deep into the audiobook game in the last two months and it has been awesome. It feels like you are sitting around a campfire listening to someone tell a story.
Humans have been listening to stories since the beginning of time. Reading books is somewhat of new phenomenon as past societies restricted such reading and materials to the wealthy that could afford it. This makes me assume that listening to books is natural or at least geared towards our being.
The advancement of technology allows us to listen to books on a handheld device while we walk around. We have access to brilliant minds at the push of a button. Amazing!
Get walking and listening!
