For a long time, I thought I had no time to read books. But somehow I got inspired to start reading last year. It was a great idea.

I started a Trello board for my book notes in March 2019. As part of my end-of year retrospective, I counted the number of titles on this board. I was surprised to find 67 of them!

I’ve never developed impressive reading speed,  even though I was fascinated by the idea of photoreading in my teenage years.

So how did I do this? My secret is to listen to audiobooks at 2~3x speed during my commutes and sometimes while I cook. In the books I read this year, only 6 of them were physical books, the rest were unabridged audiobooks. They were mostly non-fiction books that explain how things work.

How does it work? An average audiobook is about 6~14 hours long. If you listen to it at double speed, which sounds like a fast speaker, it takes around 3~7 hours. My daily commute takes about 50 mins each way. This means I can finish a book in about 2~4 days. Each month I can comfortably listen to between 5~9 audiobooks just during my commutes. 

Books have been immensely helpful to me this year. I gained many new skills and became calmer. Sometimes I tailor my reading list for the month to the work I’m doing. For example, I planned to start working on marketing in April, so I made a list of marketing books for March. Having an objective when reading can improve reading speed and how much you remember. It’s also helpful to read multiple books in one subject around the same time. It lets you learn new concepts from different angles and compare different schools of thoughts.

There is something amazing to realise about reading books. There is an expert somewhere spending years learning about a subject and then put it into a book. Then you get to learn it in a few hours.

Josh Kaufman made a good argument that reading can be more effective than formal education. For business books, I recommend checking out The Personal MBA Reading List.

There is profound knowledge out there in books. Knowledge prepares us to make smarter decisions in life.  

• productivity
• reading