Craving stimulation and bored of blowhard  podcasts?

⅘ of podcast listeners listen to seven hours of podcasts a week. That a lot of off-the-cuff banter and advice. How to get more value out of leisure listening? Here’s a strategy enabled me to read more difficult nonfiction in six months for free than I had in years.

Last spring, I was bored of podcasts, especially those where a host freestyles on a topic or answers listener questions. Nor was I the mood for interviews or radio shows or serials. Produced modularity? No thanks.  How to read challenging books in limited time and with finite energy? Buying more books didn’t make sense; they would linger on my Kindle unread. 

My solution? Inspired by Cal Newport’s advice to adopt reading as “high quality leisure” and Katy Milkman’s idea of temptation bundling, I replaced podcasts on my daily walks with digital audiobooks from the library.

I used to think listening to audiobooks was a lesser form of reading, but I ’ve changed my mind. Audiobooks are gaining in popularity. The Pew Research Centre reports that the percentage of US adults who report having listened to an audiobook in the last year has doubled from  2015 (12%) to 2021 (23%).

Research is catching up to popular practice. Anisha Singh and Patricia A. Alexander, educational researchers at the University of Maryland conducted a review on audiobooks and comprehension and found little difference in how well people performed on comprehension tests after listening to a  narrative or mixed method text as an audiobook, but people’s comprehension wasn’t as effective when the text was expository. So listen to a novel or nonfiction with a good dose of storytelling, but if you are reading a textbook, it is probably better to stick with a book or digital text or to listen to the book as you read the written text. 

Now when I go walking or do chores I usually have some book or other on the go and power through texts quickly.  Because listening to an audiobook is a transitory experience - you can’t go back and reread as easily as you can with a physical book or digital text, capture notes and reflections as you go. We are all more likely to comprehend what we read if we go to the trouble to make notes for ourselves and devise a system for annotating the text regardless whether it is physical, digital or audio. For example, I found myself stopping to capture key terms and memorable phrases on my phone.

I started listening in the late spring last year and ended up finishing 12 audiobooks in 2022. Three were just the kind of difficult book I wanted to challenge myself with: 

  • David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”

  • Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Era of Surveillance Capitalism”

  • James Suzman’s “Work”

There is no way I would have managed to finish these in their physical form.

So, if you want to read more, give audiobooks a try.

#audiobooks #temptationbundling #highqualityleisure #learning #coaching