Photo Credit: Flickr/ r. nial bradshaw

T oday, I want to teach you about one of the most important productivity hacks I’ve ever learned.

This one simple tip has single-handedly improved my technical skills, communication skills, business knowledge, and overall satisfaction with life. Even better, it hasn’t taken an ounce of extra time out of my life to implement.

Now, I know what you’re saying to yourself. You’re saying “But Pat, this is too good to be true!” Fear not, naysayer, for there really is a simple explanation.

Ready for it?

The tip is this: listen to audiobooks.

How Engineers Commit Career Suicide

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

     – Mark Twain

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

      – Dr. Seuss

I know, I know, this doesn’t seem like all that big a secret, but the statistics give a different story. Research from the PEW Internet and American Life Project showed some fascinating/ unfortunate trends related to how much people read:

• 23% of full time workers in the USA say they never do any reading related to work
• 44% of Americans 16 or older don’t even read occasionally for work or school.

I firmly believe that engineers need to keep up to date on trends in their industry. They need to learn about their technical domain and the business environment that they operate in. Not doing so can lead to major professional deficiencies if left for too long. This can be career suicide.

Unfortunately, that takes a heck of a lot of work to keep yourself up to date. Engineers work long hours and have busy lives outside of work too. When are you supposed to find time to read?

My answer is that you don’t need to find time if you listen to audiobooks.

The Power of Audiobooks

I’ve been “reading” with audiobooks for a little more than a year now, and it’s changed me in a big way. You wouldn’t believe how much time you spend doing monotonous daily tasks that can be transformed into productive audiobook time.

For me, I’ve discovered that I can enjoy an audiobook whenever I’m:

• Commuting to work
• Running
• Walking the dog
• At the gym
• Shoveling the driveway (Thank you, Canadian winter)
• Mowing the lawn
• Folding laundry
• Doing the dishes
• Cleaning the house
• Ironing my clothes
• Getting ready in the morning

So all of these little every day activities become learning opportunities for me. I’ve finished 23 books in the last 15 months listening to them without taking any additional time out of my day. This has been incredibly powerful.

My reading list for the last 15 months:

• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – John C. Maxwell
• The 15 Invaluable Laws of Leadership – John C. Maxwell
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey (can you tell I like books with numbers in the title?)
• Where Good Ideas Come From – Steven Johnson and Eric Singer
• Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
• Sales & Marketing: 25 Keys to Selling Your Products – Michael A. Kamnis
• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable – Seth Godin
• One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com – Richard L. Brandt and Neil Shah
• Manager 3.0: A Millennial’s Guide to Rewriting the Rules of Management – Brad Karsh and Courtney Templin
• Make Today Count – John C. Maxwell
• Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business – Bruce Poon Tip
• Linchpin – Seth Godin
• The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
• Jack: Straight from the Gut – Jack Welch
• Improve Your Memory – Gary Small
• The Icarus Deception – Seth Godin
• Guerrilla Marketing for the Home-based Business – Seth Godin and Jay Conrad Livens
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement – Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Crush It – Gary Vaynerchuk
• Coping with Difficult People – Robert M. Bramson
• The Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawade
• Attitude 101 – John C. Maxwell
• The Art of Influence – Chris Widener

That’s about a book every 2-3 weeks. This is infinitely more than what I had read before getting into audiobooks.

My other secret trick is that I listen to these books at 1.5X (i.e. reading at 1.5X the speed of sound… get it?!) so I can power through them quickly. You’d be amazed at how quickly you can get used to this. It’s a great way to get through material quickly.

The Single Best Place to Get Audiobooks

My favourite place to find audiobooks is Audible.com. If I buy an audiobook, it’s from these guys.

Audible has a library of over 150,000 titles, so they’ve got almost anything you could ever want. I’ve never come across a situation where they didn’t have what I was looking for. The site is super easy to use, and you can exchange anything you buy, no questions asked. You can listen on your computer, smartphone, iPod, whatever you’ve got ;-)

I’ve  got a special arrangement with Audible.com so that EngineeringAndLeadership.com readers can get a free 30 day trial, and a free audiobook from their website. I highly recommend checking this out so you can see what audiobooks are all about, with no risk to you.

Get Your Free Audiobook Now!

Engineering and Leadership Challenge

I’m challenging you to think of a book you’ve been meaning to read for a long time. If you can’t think of one, grab one from the list I wrote out above. Go get the audio version of that book for free and try it out to see how you like it. You’ll come out having finally read that book, and you’ll have gotten to try the whole audiobook thing without any cost to you. Win-win.

Once you’ve finished the book, come back here and let me know what you read and what you thought about it in the comments section.

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