I’m wondering if you’ll agree with me or not when I say that you can’t manage time.
But you CAN craft it so that you have a better relationship with time going forward. Understanding the difference between managing and crafting time can have a huge impact when you want to overcome a challenge, enhance your productivity, and improve other aspects of your life and work.
While I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, I’m not averse to working towards making rituals and habits that will help me improve myself on a wide variety of levels. Over the past few years I’ve taken on the challenge of reading more. Not blog posts or magazine articles, but books. The biggest part of that challenge was finding ways to make it happen with as little friction as possible.
In other words, rather than managing my time to include more time for reading, I’ve been crafting my time so reading happens.
I discovered a service and app that has removed more friction than anything else: Blinkist.
I’ve written about what Blinkist is and how much it costs. This post shows you how much Blinkist can help you.
What Blinkist offers are valuable insights from each book it delivers. These condensed versions of books are called “blinks” and they not only allow for faster reading, but they allow for deeper reading. Blinkist isn’t the main source of my reading, but it definitely plays a role in my reading habit.
Here are the 3 things Blinkist offers that helps me read more.
1. Blinkist mixes up the medium
One of the things that has helped me increase my reading is that I have a variety of ways to read books. Bringing Blinkist into the mix actually helps me more quickly decide what to read.
Why?
Simply put, if I want to get the “bare essentials” of a book, I’ll start off by checking it out in Blinkist. Then if I like the message of the book I’m more likely to buy the full book, and most likely in paper form. No other reading aid does that for me. I have rarely (if ever) bought the paper version of a book I already own in digital or audio format. Blinkist gives me opportunities to not only discover more books, but to discover which books I really want to add to my library. Of course this also helps me decide, when possible, which books to order through the public library.
2. Blinkist delivers shorter reading times
In order to improve my reading habit, I’d like to be able to read more, and read quickly as well. Blinkist delivers on that front, too. I’m reading more frequently as a result of using Blinkist. I can knock out a “blink” in an exercise session fairly easily, and I digest a great deal of information in the process. I’m able to read an entire “blink” first thing in the morning, as they take less than 30 minutes. These shorter reading times also allow me to still keep up with my other reading materials (blog posts, magazine articles).
3. Blinkist takes care of my non-fiction
Blinkist is great for my non-fiction reading because I’m actually reading more fiction. Why? I’ve been lax in this area for years, having focused my reading energy on works of non-fiction almost exclusively. Now I can use Blinkist to digest some stellar non-fiction works while using other reading options to take in more fiction. I’m certainly grateful that Blinkist helps me read more fiction than I have in a long time.
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