A thread on reading habits in times of audiobooks.

This year I have read 0 books & listened to 18. In sharp contrast to where I was 2 years back when I first decided to give Audible a shot to give my eyes some much needed rest. I absolutely hated it -> https://twitter.com/dillisingh/status/1021271342182780928

I decided to move to audiobooks after reading Chris Voss’s Never Split The Difference in which he explains how important a skill listening is. People in your organisation, your relatives, your friends, etc suck at putting their thoughts to words.

Most people are crappy writers but that does not mean their views aren’t worth paying attention to.

The onus is on you to listen to them carefully and unearth their concerns, suggestions, emotions, motivators, etc.

In 2019, I decided to move some of my reading to audiobooks. Ended up with read:listen to 13:3. Nothing fancy but it was a start. Must accept that most of these books were light (subtle art of not.., tao of pooh, etc) but I couldn’t recall anything after a week or so..

A conscious change I made was to stop treating listening to books as a passive background activity to a conscious foreground one. This meant no listening to audio books while driving and lying down (as it would make me sleep).

This meant dedicating an hour to sit up on the couch and listen, like I would do with a book.

The overall retention improved with time but the key change I made was to use the bookmarks functionality in Audible religiously.

This means I can go back and listen to specific parts as I need and writing a 10 word summary while adding a bookmark, is like a soft equivalent of a post-it note or writing in the margin.

Sometime after my 3rd audiobook, I started getting eager to see if i can speed up the narration. Started with 1.25x and am now at 1.65x.

1.65 works well for me in terms of coherence and I am able to listen to longer books in reasonable time frames (<10 days).

Finally, I started posting the practical wisdom I come across in books on Linkedin & my blog http://infermuse.com , which sort of cements my own understanding. It also helps in retention, as I have to go through the topics again while writing (using the bookmarks in Audible).

To summarise, I would highly recommend trying out audiobooks to give your eyes some respite from screens and more importantly to improve your listening skills.

-x-fin-x-