In business, your two main resources are money and time. You may need to spend money to make more time (such as when you outsource work or hire out for certain tasks), or you may need to trade time for money (such as when you work with clients), or you sometimes may need to do both (when a problem shows up and it will take both money and time to fix.) With everything you have to do to keep your business running, it is useful to try and find points of leverage in your business: places where you can save time, money, or both.
One challenge is in managing information and being able to actually listen to all the audios you download. I like learning new information, but I always wish it took less time and was faster to do. Sometimes, I just want to fast forward to the good information and skip all the introductions, etc. So I did some research to figure out if there was a way to listen faster. I found this blog post which gave details on how to do this, using various media players.
Since I primarily listen at my desk, and use Windows Media Player 10, I can tell you how it worked on my system. To speed up audios, it takes just a simple adjustment. Open the audio file in Windows Media Player, click View (second item in the top tab), then Enhancements, then Play Speed Settings. Set the speed to 1.4x faster- which will save you 15 minutes per 60 minute audio (assuming I did my math right.) Now, I found this AFTER I’d just spent 60 minutes listening to an audio, so I wasn’t able to confirm these numbers- but the sound quality was reasonable and it didn’t lose much quality.
Since I am waaayy behind on all these business building audios, you can be sure I’ll be listening faster from now on.
Learning and implementing new information is vital to our ongoing business success.
So the next time you want to listen faster, use speed enhancement to do so. Saving 15 minutes per hour may not sound like much, but you’ll gain back an hour for every four audios you listen to. And those kinds of savings do add up.
