How long do you spend on communiting to work everyday? Or, do you often find yourself waiting for 30 minutes to be called at a doctor’s office?
If you spend more than 15 minutes driving to work every day, then you want to think about how you spend the time. If it is 15 minutes and if you drive to your office 5 days a week, you are spending 15 minutes x 2 (round trip) x 5 days, 150 minutes a week! Don’t you feel it is a large amount of time spent just on driving?
I want to share 3 ways I’ve been doing over the past several years to use the time productively. You can do them not only while driving to work but also taking a train, waiting for your turn in a hospital, or cooking a dinner. There are some wonderful tools that will change your life. They are very easy and will come natural to you. It is very easy to make them into your habit. So, please give them a try.
A killer but inexpensive tool that will transform your time on commuting to work
Before getting into 3 productive hacks, you may want to invest a little bit on an useful tool if you haven’t already. It is a pair of wireless earbuds. One product I’ve been using for the past several months and finding it providing a high value is this one. Sony WF-C700N wireless earbuds. They are about USD90 or so. They relatively have long battery life (not having to charge it every day) and are easy to set up with your smartphone or tablet. I’ve been using them for several months without any problems. One thing I do not like about them is syncing them to your devices can be a bit tricky and different from the way you do with other earbuds like Apple Airpods Pro I’ve also been using heavily at least for 3 years. I mainly use them for workouts because they fit my ears better than the Sony earbuds. If I use the Sony earbuds during my exercises, they would fall off in the 1st 10 minutes. But they are good for use in commute (specifically driving. If you bike to work, they may be be the best option for you). They are so many options out there, and if you do not want to spend much money, there are decent ones at lower prices. My point is that you may want to use wireless earbuds when doing these 3 productive hacks.
1. Listen to books
Books are the best sources of information we are able to tap into to work on ourselves. And the best of all, most books nowadays are really cheap. You have access to a number of great books, some of which may change your life by reading them. But it can be difficult to bring yourself to reading books when there are so many distractions. So, driving or commuting to work can be a good chance for you to read books. But reading books while driving? Yes. We can now listen to books. You can join Audible membership to listen to many books, free of charge.
I’ve read more than 100 books during my commutes by listening to the audio versions. I learned a lot by reading so many books this way. Sometimes, listening to books can even be more learning than reading them. Some books are read by their authors who definitely know about the subjects better than anyone else. So, you can feel the passion the authors have on the subject and where they want to emphasize. Being able to learn directly from the person who wrote the book is great.
Also, in audio versions, there are some benefits or bonus materials that are not available on paper versions or Kindle versions. If you buy a book on Kindle, you can also listen to it by running the auto-reading function.
As I have been buying audio books on Amazon, I’ve been listening to my books on Audible platform. And if you are an Amazon Prime member, you may be entitled to free books. There are hundreds of great books that you may be able to start listening to, free of charge. This has been a game changer for me, and I’ve downloaded hundreds of books on my smartphone. Because of the benefits you get from this deal, it is almost no brainer that you won’t do this if you haven’t already. Over a course of just one year, you can probably triple your knowledge.
2. Check your favorite podcasts
Another way I use my commute time is to listen to my favorite podcasts. It is similar to listening to books, but listening to podcasts can be another great way to listen to news, what’s currently going on in the world, and listening to experts of subjects you are interested in learning about.
There are so many podcasts today you can listen to and a few apps/platforms you can listen to them on. And, there are some blog articles ranking each platform/app, so please do some search and find your app or platform. But what is important is to have an easy access and tool for you to listen to your favorite podcasts on a regular basis.
My favorites are NPR’s “How I built this” by Guy Raz interviewing successful entrepreneurs to discuss and learn how they built their products and brands. Each episode dives into how entrepreneurs have gone through tough journeys of building their products. It is a great podcast for you to learn processes and how you may go about building your own products.
Other podcasts like Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam and NPR’s “Planet Money” will give you great insight into different subjects and broaden your knowledge. I think it is great if you can learn a diversity of fields to widen your paradigms. If you are able to make it a habit to constantly learn about different subjects, you’ll become a better thinker with more diverse perspectives on more things.
3. Turn speech into text
Another way you may want to spend your commute time in a more productive way that I recommend is to try writing memos, your to-do-lists, or whatever you are working on by speaking them to your smartphone. A simple but convenient and free app you can use is Apple Dictation. It is a default app that you should have if you are using an iPhone. Turn on the app and start speaking to your earbuds.
You can also use a convenient tool like VoicePal, which turns what you speak to it and thoughts into texts and organized transcripts. You can capture your ideas and what pops up in your head instantly using this app.
You can transfer what you spoke to your PC and other devices to further work on them. If the time it takes you to arrive at your office is 20 minutes, you may be able to finish writing 20-minute scripts for your presentation in one commute.
In summary, commute to work is a perfect and interrupted time you have to yourself to work on things that you want to focus on. If your commute is more than 20 minutes, you have 40 minutes a day and 200 minutes a week! Imagine how much you can accomplish in one week by taking advantage of your commute.
You can listen to your favorite books and podcasts to accelerate your learning and turn your speech into texts to speed up your writing.
These are very powerful ways you can start doing today to create time out of your regular days. So, why don’t you start doing them from tomorrow?