Episode: 2477
Title: HPR2477: Reading Audio Books While Distracted
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2477/hpr2477.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:50:05

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This is HPR episode 2477 entitled Reading Audio Books While Distracted.
It is hosted by Nodamid and in about 10 minutes long, and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is my attempt to solve the problem of listening to audio books when you can't
fully concentrate.
Today's show is licensed under a CC hero license.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
At Universal Access to All Knowledge, by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Diodidi Dummy with another episode for Hacker Public Radio.
I'm recording this because I've stumbled upon something I think might be interesting
or useful to this crowd in particular.
So basically the problem is that I'm going to talk about is how to watch or how to listen
to audio books and maybe in a podcast as well while at work.
I don't mean to kind of work that's dangerous where you shouldn't be listening to something,
but the kind of work where there's nothing preventing you from listening to things, but
the work is distracting.
So if you're like me, you may be tried to do this in the past and you'll find that you
get through a book and or get so far in there and then you're like, oh, I don't remember
anything of that.
So it's frustrating and you don't want to listen to the whole book again, so you end
up just listening to music maybe so that it's not as important to you that you pay attention.
So that's a situation I'm talking about.
Well, I recently decided to take a look at that listening to audio books while I'm at
work because what I found there's a lot of books that I want to read and I don't really
have time to sit down and read, but I do have lots of times that I can listen, but the
problem is I can't always concentrate.
So I decided to take a look at that and see if I could break that into kind of treat
that like a regular problem and see if there were any solutions.
And what I didn't do, so maybe this is a technique that's well known and I'm an idiot,
but I didn't Google this to see if other people have some ideas.
So it just came to me kind of, anyways, I kind of do that a lot.
I'll think about a problem first before I go looking for a solution.
If it's a kind of problem that I kind of want to think about on my own was I do that
sometimes.
If it's usually if it's something I just need an answer to or I'm pretty sure there's
no way I would know the answer or be able to figure the answer out in a reasonable amount
of time, then I'll automatically search for it.
But if it's a problem that I think is interesting, the problem itself or I just want to amend
the mood to just think about something, then I'll try to solve it on my own or at least
think about it for a while before I go searching and that's what I did in this case.
So with books, I just kind of broke this into things, right?
So into the different ways you can listen to audio books.
And so for me in particular, I usually have two kind of formats.
One is the whole book at once and the other is chapter by chapter.
So that's the kind of format that I had.
And then the other thing is, well, that was really it.
And so what I thought was maybe if I could, I thought about it and then the other thing
that I came into my mind is to a way to actually, on the player, how to listen to them.
And so for example, there's at full speed or sped up and I decided that I didn't really
try sped up because I don't.
If I'm concentrating then, like if I'm walking around and I'm not really doing anything
else aside from walking around, then I like to do things at full speed or maybe if I'm
on the public transport or driving in the car, then sped up is fine because then I'm
kind of focused and paying attention and the speed doesn't hurt me.
But in those situations, I don't have a need to, I don't have this problem because I'm
paying attention.
So I decided to kind of dismiss the idea of it kind of ruled out reading them sped
up right off the path.
And then the other way is to, like I'm a player, I can loop through with the files, I can
loop through all, loop through one, loop, you know, or just play them one time through.
So what I thought might be interesting, and so the problem that I have too is, well,
so what I thought I would do is break things up into chunks and then if I had to go back
because I missed basically the whole point of whatever I'm listening to, then it wouldn't
be so bad if I had to went through, you know, a certain number, you know, smaller volume,
if I had to repeat that, I wouldn't have wasted as much time.
So I started off with reading three chapters, listening to three chapters at a time and
then I found out that, you know, I just did it kind of as best I could, not only while
I was doing something else, and I found at the end of the three chapters, again, I missed
a lot and also some of the things that I heard in the first chapter or the third chapter
were kind of spoilers for the first chapter and I didn't really get the first chapter properly
so that was kind of a bummer. So then I, so that was, it worked pretty well because I got
like the, I got the, it worked pretty well. After I looked through again, I was paying attention
more and I got more, I mean, I got more out of it, I think, then if I would have read
the whole, listen to the whole book at once, but it wasn't still quite, something didn't
really seem good satisfying about it so then I just decided, well, I would listen chapter
by chapter and if I go chapter by chapter, then I can kind of move, kind of along with
the author once, because if you know, he's kind of chapter by chapter, I can kind of take
those as my logical unit of work and then it would be smaller chunks that would be repeating
and if I didn't, if I got through a whole chapter without needing to repeat anything
because I felt, felt like I caught everything, then then there would be less that I would
be repeating. For example, if I, if I would listen into, you know, three chapter chunks
and I had to repeat, I'd repeat repeating chapters, you know, the chapter, the first chapter
every time, even though I, you know, I got the gist of the first chapter. So, so I tried
that and it seemed to have worked pretty well. I listened to the triplanetary that way and
one of the HBR book club books and I felt pretty good about it. I'm going to listen to
a couple more before I kind of, you know, fully decide, but I think this, this method
worked pretty good. So, just to recap, what seems to work well for me is play, play
books chapter by chapter on a loop, one chapter looping at a time and then once I feel like,
I mean, there's no, I guess, objective way to do this, but once I feel like I got the
chapter, then I'll skip to the next chapter and again, loop that one chapter over and
over until I, until I get through the book and, you know, it takes longer to get through
a book this way, but I feel like the, I got, you know, I got some halfway decent comprehension,
I got the story and the extra time would have just been spent listening to music,
or maybe podcasts that I didn't care if I kind of missed the point of the podcast.
So, I don't feel like the extra time was valuable time. I mean, listening to music can be valuable,
but you know, it didn't help me get through the books that I wanted to, that I want to get
through and so, yeah, so this seems like a reasonable approach and if it works well,
I think I might do this with podcasts to split them up into, you know, run it through a program
that will split them up into chunks of a certain length because I have the same issue with podcast.
I don't usually care so much if I don't listen to a whole podcast or I miss the meeting,
but there are some that would be nice, but so, yeah, this is something you might be,
might check out if you have the same problem. If you do, let us know how it worked for you.
That's all.
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