The average daily commute to work and back home is one hour. That means on average you are spending 5 hours on the road a week. Or roughly 20 hours on the road a month. Or 240 hours on the road a year! What do a lot of us do while we are on the road? Most of us listen to music. Some start talking away on their cell-phones. Others feel the need to yell at every inept driver on the road. When you take into account that most university students spend roughly 250 hours a year in the classroom earning a degree, you can understand the true importance of those accumulated road hours. Commuting hours should never be wasted, but rather converted into value-producing time for personal and/or professional development.

Over the years, I have accumulated quite a collection of audiobooks and courses. I make sure that whenever I get into my vehicle for a drive that will last over 20 minutes, that I have an audiobook CD ready to play. Just think about it. In one daily commute, you can have the equivalent education of a university lecture right there in your car, without doing anything extra.

People are often surprised that I can speak in both Portuguese and Spanish and they ask me where I learned how to speak those languages. I tell them, "Inside my car." I simply listen to those foreign language courses everyday to and from work and having not added any extra things on my already busy schedule, I have self-taught myself two new languages.

Audiobooks will never replace the written word, but think of them as a time-efficiency tool. We all know that our value as employees and as people is often weighed heavily by the knowledge and skills we possess and therefore it becomes important for us to always increase our value by continuing to educate ourselves on subject matter that is applicable to our own lives. Audiobooks and courses provide a medium for you to accomplish this with little to no direct impact on your existing schedule. Now that i-pods are widespread, the ability to learn while on the go has never been simpler.

The audiobook industry publishes a lot of great titles out there for personal and professional development and I highly recommend that you convert those commuting hours into hours of significant value for your overall self-improvement. If you dedicate your commuting hours to learning something of value, then in a 30 year career, you can get the equivalent education of seven or eight PhDs without changing anything in your life. Take action on this today and go out and get your first audiobook and make it a regular commuting ritual.