Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips and Personal Productivity Tools

Listening to audiobooks while exercising at the gym or doing the laundry is a great way to do useful multitasking.

But, unlike a physical book, there’s no convenient way to place a bookmark where you stop. It’s too easy to get lost in the many files or hit ‘back’ by accident and lose your progress.

However, there is a relatively simply way to make listening to your audiobooks an easier experience by using smart playlists to track what you’ve already listened to.

Here is the method I use:

• Make A Smart Playlist for The Book’s Title Make a new smart playlist and set “Album Name” to the book’s title.

• Set Files to ‘Remember Position’. Select all the files inside that smart playlist. Right click and select ‘get info’ then click on the ‘options’ tab. Make sure that ‘remember position’ is set to ‘yes’. This way, if you don’t finish a file your iPod will still pick up where you left off.

• Set the Play Counts to Zero. If you’re starting the book fresh, make sure that all the play counts are set to zero. This is done by selecting all the files, right clicking and selecting ‘reset play count’.

• Tell The Smart Playlist to Exclude What You’ve Finished. Lastly, right click on the smart playlist and add one more thing: ‘Play count is 0’.

As you listen to your audiobook, the files that you’ve finished will drop off your list. Now, the first file is always where you left off.

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Header photograph by suchitra prints