How much is your time worth?

Would you like to grab hours of your time back and still get through all the material you need to read, listen to or watch? I share 3 time-saving tips to help you do that!

With so much information; articles, videos and audios swamping us our time is becoming more and more precious, don’t you think?

Yes, we do want to keep up to speed with anything that can help us in our business, our careers or our hobbies/interests – but sometimes it can get overwhelming. There are just not enough hours in the day!

So how can we keep on top of all this; absorb all the material we want without sacrificing the hours we need to do other things?

It’s a challenge isn’t it?

You see, for me, it was important to find a way of minimising the time I spent absorbing necessary information because I’m carrying out huge amounts of research for new products I’m currently working on. I’m talking about checking hundreds of hours of audios and videos; thousands of pages of written material; that’s only a slight exaggeration; I totalled up the pages of the book and articles I’ve researched for one project and it comes to 2,336!

Fortunately I discovered 3 tips to save my time and still get through it all; some you’ll already know about, others may be a welcome solution.

Here they are…

3 Time-Saving Research Tips:

1. READING - I’m pretty certain you already know this one. Speed reading.

Now I’m a pretty fast reader anyway – or so I always thought. Mark, my husband, and I have similar reading tastes when it comes to fiction. So when we buy a new book by a favourite author I always read it first because he takes far longer than I do to finish it.

But I was surprised to discover that my reading speed was only just above average – I say ‘was’ because after going through a program with Patricia Hutchings of Unique Perspectives Un-limited Inc. I’ve boosted my reading speed 2-fold. That has been a huge help. (The training is part of Rich Schefren’s Strategic Profits program - check his blog at Strategic Profits.)

If you have a mountain of reading material you need to get through and you’ve never tried speed-reading training, then give it a go.

Think about it, if it only takes you half or a third of your normal time to read those articles and books what does that mean in saved time for you and your business?

2. WATCHING VIDEOS – More and more self-study and information material is delivered by video these days, especially online. And frequently the delivery mechanism is through Quicktime movies. The problem of course is you are stuck with the presenter’s delivery speed.

Well, actually No – you’re not! I’m watching hours and hours of these videos so I was delighted to find a way of speeding up the Quicktime movie-playback:

When you are playing the Quicktime movie:

Press Ctrl+K to display the A/V Controls (on the menu Window, A/V Controls).
Drag the Playback Speed indicator to the speed you want to play it at.

When you close the Quicktime file it will ask if you want to save the changes. I usually choose Save so I don’t have to reset the playback speed next time I watch the video.

3. LISTENING TO AUDIO - speeding up audio (or video) can give the sound-track a chipmunk effect, which can be irritating to listen to. So I was really chuffed to get a software package that lets you increase the speed of the audio; MP3 or WAV files - anything up to 3.5 times faster (I haven’t tried it that fast!) without the high-pitched chipmunk sound.

What I really liked about this software is it converts and saves your speeded-up MP3 audio file into a new file (leaving the original intact) so you can transfer it onto your MP3 player or even create an audio-CD if you have Nero-Burner or similar CD recording software.

The program is called FasterAudio and Yes! - this is a blatant plug for it - because I’ve saved so many research and study hours with it. That’s why I think anyone who listens regularly to informational audios needs this in their time-saving arsenal.

Up to now there was a restriction on the distribution of the program. It is shortly due to go on general release. The good news is I persuaded the developer to let me tell you about it first.

It’s Not A High Cost

I asked at the beginning ‘How much is your time worth?’

Is saving hours of your listening time worth an investment of £67?

For me it is a definite “Yes!” - but this guy is based in Canada, so he priced FasterAudio in US dollars!

$67!

That means you’re only looking at around £38 for a must-have, easy-to-use, time-saving audio conversion program.

Will I understand speeded-up audio?

That was the question I first asked myself, and I was surprised at how much I actually do.

But why not listen for yourself? On FasterAudio’s website there are audio testimonials from 15 different people - each with different ‘normal’ speaking speeds. You can listen to them speeded up from 100% to 125%, 150%, 175% or 200%. Find the speed that works for you and then calculate how many hours you could save.

OK, ’sales pitch’ over - but seriously it is worth considering the FasterAudio program [Aff]

I hope these tips help you keep on top of the material you need to know in a lot less time. I’m off to do some more listening - I’ll catch up with you again next week.

~ Carol Bentley