I am an audiobook user and I consider travel time as dead or unproductive time and I try to make the most of it by listening and learning from audiobooks. On a recent three week visit to the UK several people visited all over the country and I spent many hours in the car. To get to the UK in the first place, my journey took me twenty-eight hours in total from house to house.
I started with a fully charged iPod and spent much of the trip listening to Without Fail by Lee Child, a novel I had downloaded from the AudioBookGo audiobook site. It was the shortened version and it was a good six hour ride for me.
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the data transfer/charging cable to connect my iPod to my laptop and decided not to purchase a new one during my visit. In hindsight this was silly as I then added up the hours spent in the car on trips over an hour and the total was thirty-three hours. This equated to eleven hours wasted each week, time that could have been spent listening to a series of seminars I previously purchased on some internet marketing techniques that interested me. Oh yeah, and I wasted all those hours on the trip back from the UK.
I did catch up with some radio issues though, so I didn’t lose all my downtime. Time is something we can never get back, but by making use of dead and unproductive time in our lives, we can truly “give time back to our lives” in a manner of speaking.
There are so many options and types of audiobooks available to download from the Internet, the choice is so great. From classic novels to modern business books, from TV and radio humor to learning a foreign language, from biographies to historical accounts, from crime and thrillers to health and recreation guides. With all this choice it’s hard to understand why so many travelers don’t make better use of their time and try to upgrade or entertain themselves. That said, a lot of people are doing just this, as sales of audiobooks, from CDs, and internet downloads increase monthly.
Of course, car and plane travel are not the only times when we have time that can be put to better use. I walk my dog for thirty minutes every day and spend that time listening to my audiobooks, it doesn’t bother my dog at all! I can’t say I listen to audiobooks anywhere else like some people do. I think some others listen when they garden and do daily chores, but that’s not for me. It doesn’t take me long to do the dishes and my gardening is quick and thorough and not fit to have my headphones on.
Now I’ve bought a separate power cable for my iPod and it’s already in my travel bag, so I don’t intend to waste any more valuable time on my future travels. As I get older, I become more interested in new fields and I really want to learn as much as I can. Fortunately, there is now so much information available in audiobook and downloadable form that I can use all the downtime and unproductive time to my advantage.