I’ve heard the mantra “Leaders are readers” – you probably have, too. The problem is that, if you’re busy like me, you struggle to find time to read as much as you want to or as much as you feel you should.

Today, I’m going to share a couple things I’m doing to help make this easier.

Physical books

There is something special about reading a physical book. You can actually feel the pages. It’s easy to underline, write notes, or dogear pages.

However, physical books take up space. If you have lot of books, a lot of space can be used just in storing books (I have boxes and boxes of books).

eBook/Kindle books

To save physical space, Kindle or other types of eBooks make it easy to store a lot of books in a single device that may be even smaller than a single book. This makes it easy to take a lot of books virtually anywhere.

While you can still take notes, it seems to be a little more cumbersome in my opinion.

Audiobooks

A downfall to both physical books and eBooks is that you can’t do anything else at the same time (well, I guess you can do some exercise like walking on a treadmill or exercise bike).

A lot of the books I “read” are actually audiobooks. I can listen to the books while I’m doing a variety of tasks – mowing, cleaning, driving, etc. I can even speed it up and get through the books a little faster.

A downfall to audiobooks is that it’s easier to get distracted and you don’t get as much out of the books.

Blinkist

While you can miss a lot of the details in books, many times, all you need to do is grasp the main points. A lot of the details just support or prove the main point(s). There is value in getting the details, for sure, but you can make a lot of progress if you take the main point and apply it to your life.

Blinkist is an app that is like Cliffnotes – which you never used to take a shortcut when writing book reports back in school. A benefit of Blinkist, though, is that you can have written summaries and audio summaries, so it’s like a summarized ebook and audiobook in one.

While this doesn’t let you get the depth of going through the full book, you are able to get those important points out of it and have a good foundational basis.

You can check out Blinkist for yourself.