The real advantage of audiobooks
By: Abhishek Jangra
Tags: Learning, Self Development, Time Management, Audiobooks, Reading

The real advantage of audiobooks

Hey friends, hope you’re all doing well and wearing a mask 😷 when you go out.

Generally, I write about very specific topics related to programming which take a couple of days to produce, polish, and publish. But with this blog, I want to start a series of more frequent, short and simple blogs sharing practical tips that have helped boost my productivity and happiness.

This pandemic has been tough for every one of us in different ways, but it has also pushed us to form some good new habits. For me, as I was spending more time at home; I started to read regularly. In the evening after work, I would just lie down on the couch, zone out to Read and Unwind and spend about an hour reading.

Some of the books I read this year

But after a while, I started some new habits like waking up early and working out every day (at home). These habits quickly became a top priority for me and the reading habit fade <awkward silence> and faded <more awkward silence> into darkness.

At this point, I decided to try out audiobooks, I already had an audible subscription but rarely used it. I scheduled it right along with my workout timings so I instead of workout music, I would now be playing an audiobook.

Honestly, the start was meh 😪. It was kinda boring and I noticed that after a while it was really easy for the narrator to just fade into the background while I was focusing on the workout. Then I tried something which changed the game completely, and that was …

Playback speed

Just like in college, when video lectures were boring, we would dial up the playback speed (What, you didn’t? You’re lying 😜). In the app, I changed the playback speed to 1.5x. Now I had to intentionally put more focus into it to keep track of the words and I started to cling to it more and more. After a while, as I got used to it, 1.5x started to sound slow as well, so I moved to 1.8x.

This was a complete game-changer, I was able to tap into the knowledge from different books while doing other tasks which do not require a lot of focus. After about 6 weeks, slowly increasing the speed every few days, I recently reached the milestone of 3x speed and feel comfortable and focused.

This brought out the real benefit of audiobooks, the reason you clicked on this blog, which is the number of books one can finish. While normally it would take me about 2 weeks to finish a book or about 300 pages, with an audiobook at about 2x speed it takes only a week. This allows you to try out newer genres and also re-read your favorites.

You don’t have to take out separate time in the day to read. AND you can read faster as well.

Now, there are a few caveats we need to talk about. This works perfectly well for books which are like a pot full of knowledge and ideas that you can tap into. It does not make a lot of sense for books where you have to go through passages multiple times to understand them and take notes, for example — tech books or books related to any course. I also noticed that some books may require you to slow down for example books where you need enough time to think and connect to old events in the book, so don’t shy dialing it down a bit.

But overall, audiobooks are now something I keep using while I’m on a walk 🚶🏻, working out 💪🏻 and sometimes just before I go to sleep 😴 (In audible, you can set a sleep timer so the audiobook automatically stops playing some time after you doze off).

Some audiobooks from my library

That’s all for this one folks. Do try out this tip if you had difficulty sticking to audiobooks. Share your experiences in the comments and until the next one, Ciao!