Around October 2013, I decided to move from city to Gladesville which located 9 kilometres north-west of Sydney CBD. It wasn’t easy decision because I need to spend about 2 hours on commuting every day.
For the first couple months, I was fine with the long commuting time. I can distract myself with my phone or sleeping on the bus. However, I started to feel unproductive and I can feel it affected my concentration throughout the day. So, I tried to do some research on the Internet about productive use of commuting time. Most of the articles that I found suggesting to listen either podcasts or audio books.
I decided to give audio book a try and downloaded Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. If you are interested, you can easily find the audio version of this book on YouTube. At first, I was a little bit skeptical with the result but it turned out to be really helpful. I can feel that my life is back on track again. I started to use Trello to keep my list of tasks. Once in a while, I’ll update my goals and create separate boards for each project.
Since that, I have been listening to several different audio books such as 168 hours by Laura Vanderkam and Getting things done by David Allen. Both of them shared some basic principles from Eat that frog. I prefer Getting things done because it’s more straight forward and focusing on actions you can perform to improve your productivity. Although, I can say that this book is quite to hard understand so you need to listen it more than once to get a good grasp of the concept.