App Spotlight: Blinkist
If you're anything like me and so many of the folks here at theCO, you love to learn new things. Anything that could make your life a little easier, interesting, or enjoyable. You want to know all of those things. Wherever you can learn the most, you're there.
There's just one problem: you don't have the time to learn everything! You're a busy person that doesn't have hours to spare taking a class, watching a video series, or reading a WHOLE BOOK!? Reading a nonfiction book from cover to cover is completely out of the question. You have emails, texts, and tweets to read. No time for a silly book about how to reach a state of flow at your job...wait that actually sounds interesting...
Well let me make your life so much easier and enriching by introducing you to Blinkist, the solution to your overwhelming learning addiction. Blinkist is an app and web service that offers powerful and memorable summaries (or "blinks") of popular nonfiction books. Their library contains over 500 books in categories ranging from leadership to psychology to popular science, and 50 books are added every month!
The blinks take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to read and are nicely divided into 8-12 "chapters" so you can absorb the information in even smaller portions. After 15 minutes, you get a surprisingly deep understanding of the entire book. From there, you can go pick up the book for deeper reading, or move on to another book!
Unlimited access to the library is available for $4/month. Or you can get a Premium account for $7/month, which includes audio "blinks" as well as Evernote and Kindle connectivity.
If you're interested, you can read one "blink" every day for free! One a day has been plenty for me so far, but I might end up upgrading because my experience has been so great! Blinkist is the only thing that got me through my two-hour, five-days-a-week college algebra class. So try it out and quickly enrich your life!