Using Audio Programs to Increase Your Knowledge and Productivity

If you do any significant amount of driving, a simple thing you can do to increase your productivity is to listen to audio programs in your car. If your commute time to work is 45 - 60 minutes each way, you can easily listen to at least 1 book each week. Over the course of a year, that can add up to about 50 books. That is a significant number.

But here are a couple of ways you can further increase the amount of audio you listen to. The primary tool you will need is an iPod or some comparable MP3 player.

1. With the iPod, if you are listening to an audio file in the m4b fomat (similar to an mp3 file and the format used by audible.com), you can increase the playback speed. The increase in speed is generally not noticable in terms of audio quality. But it allows you to listen to about an hour's worth of audio in only 45 minutes. If you listen to a lot of audio programs, that can add up to a lot.

For example, if you listen to only 9 hours of audio per week, you can actually cover 12 hours of content at the normal speed. Over the course of a year, that's an additional 156 hours. If you listen to more, the savings is even greater.

2. There are now text-to-speech programs that do an adequate job of creating an audio file that you can listen to on your iPod or other MP3 player. This opens up a lot of new possibilities. You can:

--Type up notes of books so you can focus only on the most important points (or have an assistant type up the notes for you).

--Listen to memos from work

--Convert books in the public domain (that are already in an electronic text file format)

The only limit is your imagination.

At my website, http://www.poweraffirmations.com, I have posted a few free audio files you may find helpful using text-to-speech software. One file is James Allen's classic work "As a Man Thinketh" (in the public domain). The second is an audio version of my free e-book on Power Affirmations.

Copyright (c) 2005 Bill Marshall - All rights reserved. Feel free to republish this article provided you include the copyright information and the weblinks where possible.

For practical self-improvement tips, visit http://www.poweraffirmations.com. Get my new free e-book, "Power Affirmations: Power Positive Conditioning for Your Subconscious Mind"