Hack your commute: Focus on a long read

Marketing Week’s ‘Hack your commute’ series uncovers inspiring and fulfilling ways to spend your journeys to and from work that will expand your mind and broaden your horizons.

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You know how it is: in the 10 minutes you get each day to catch up on the marketing news, current affairs or the latest professional guidance, you find yourself scurrying from article to article, trying to gorge on knowledge like an agitated hamster filling its cheeks with sunflower seeds. Before you get halfway through the first paragraph, you’ve already clicked on the next link and within seconds have amassed more open browser tabs than you could get through in a month.

In the course of this frantic trawl for information, often the biggest catches slip through the net: the longer, often more important articles that you know will be valuable – even enjoyable – but which you don’t have time to give your full attention. Rather than letting them go and forgetting about them, instead save them for later.

Chances are, if your boss or biggest client stops you in the hallway or quizzes you in a meeting about something you should have read, it’s going to be a longer journal article or magazine feature (from Marketing Week, naturally), so it pays to apportion your energies accordingly. Yet, often, we to try consume as much information as we can in as short a time as possible by reading little more than the headlines on a homepage.

Many media brands’ apps now include the option of downloading articles to read offline, but if the piece you want to read is not available that way, don’t forget the tried and trusted alternatives of print publications, or even printing articles from the web on the office inkjet. Your commute can become the time you use for the ‘lean back’ media you miss out on during the rest of the day.

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