I used to have so much time to read.
One year I read a total of 63 books (but I wish I’d had the note-taking habit back then that I do now).
But in recent years, this has declined considerably – especially recently with the arrival of my baby daughter.
At work, I spend a fair amount of time on the road. Not long trips, but 10-15 minutes travelling to one appointment, 10 minutes to the next, and so on. Also, I can spend a bit of time at appointments waiting for clients to arrive.
In the past, I’ve listened to music en-route, and scrolled through news and social media to kill time while I waited.
I was so excited to get stuck into the new Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, that I changed my pre-order from the Kindle edition to the audio edition and started listening as soon as I left the house.
At the end of the day, I clocked the total listening time and was surprised how much I’d listened – 55 minutes of a 7-hour audiobook. This was on a day where I had less appointments than usual too. I was impressed!
Potentially I could finish an audiobook in a week following this behaviour. With most audiobooks clocking in at around 7 hours, I could theoretically listen to 52 books a year – far more than I’m able to read at the moment.
But what about taking notes?
Granted, with audiobooks, it’s much harder to take notes. I’m going to have to figure out how to use Google Assistant to take notes while I’m driving – “Hey Google, take a note”. If I can get this to go straight into UpNote, all the better. If not, I can manage collating notes from wherever Google puts them into my own system.