| I’ve heard the answer to this question somewhere, but now I can’t remember what I heard. :) More seriously, some of this, to me, depends on what I’m listening to or reading. Fiction or easy non-fiction audio books do allow some degree of multitasking. However this doesn’t apply to 90% of my reading. Technical material is much faster for me to actually read. For example, I saw an interesting paper recently[1]. It’s results are important and I’m happy to have come across them, but there is no way I could have absorbed it on an audio format without taking much more time. I read technical material like this faster because I can skim over the things I already know (like why the result is interesting, applications of the idea, complex proof steps, math background material, etc) and I can slow down for the key results I want to remember. I can go back and re-read sentences that don’t make sense to me or where I’m confused. For technical books there is so much that I don’t usually have to learn again, I can just skip to the new stuff. [1] The Power of Two Choices in Randomized Load Balancing, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=504343 |