Maximizing Commute Time: Using Audiobooks and Podcasts for Productivity

Why commute time is the most underused learning window in your week

Your commute is already blocked off on your calendar, but almost nobody treats it as learning time. If you drive five days a week, twenty-five minutes each way, you are sitting on 200 hours a year of uninterrupted audio space. If you are hybrid and commute three days, you still have 120 hours. If you work from home, a deliberate twenty-minute walk with your earbuds in gets you to the same 80 hours. The constraint is not the time. It is the decision about what goes into your ears for those minutes, and whether anything sticks once you park the car or step off the train. This guide gives you a system for that, tuned to the 2026 reality where most knowledge workers are hybrid, a quarter are fully remote, and the old five-day commute has stopped being a useful default. You will learn how to choose between audiobooks and podcasts, how to build a repeatable routine that survives a week of missed commutes, how to actually retain what you hear, and when to turn the audio off.

Who this article is for

This guide is for three kinds of readers. The first is the daily commuter who drives, takes transit, or walks to an office five days a week and wants the existing ride to pay for itself in learning. The second is the hybrid worker on a two-to-four-day office schedule whose commute routine never got built because the pattern keeps shifting week to week. The third is the fully remote worker who arrived at this page from a Google search and has no physical commute at all, but who would benefit from a deliberate listening window bolted onto a morning walk. The system works for all three, but the execution differs, and the sections below call out where it diverges.

What you will learn

• How much learning time your specific commute actually holds
• What the research says about listening while driving or riding
• A content-picking framework by commute length, mode, and learning goal
• The Deliberate Listening Window: a named routine that survives hybrid schedules
• Why driving, train, and walking each demand different content complexity
• What playback speeds preserve comprehension and where the ceiling sits
• How to capture and retain what you hear without taking notes while moving
• How to build a fake commute for remote workers without it feeling forced

Key takeaways

• Your commute is a time asset whose size depends on schedule. Five-day commuters get over 200 hours a year; three-day hybrid workers get 120; remote workers with a deliberate twenty-minute walk get 80.
• Listening matches reading for most narrative content. Virginia Clinton-Lisell’s 2022 meta-analysis of 46 studies found no reliable overall difference between the two modalities for general comprehension.
• A 2021 randomized trial found that listening while driving did not reduce knowledge retention compared with listening while undistracted, at least for the emergency medicine residents who were studied.
• Cognitive load rises with mode difficulty. Driving is more attentionally expensive than riding a train, which changes what content you can absorb.
• Retention lives in the two minutes after the ride, not during it. A brief post-commute recall ritual beats any in-transit note-taking.
• The Deliberate Listening Window is a named twenty-to-sixty-minute recurring slot tied to a stable cue (starting the car, boarding the train, opening the front door for a walk). It is the routine unit this guide builds.

How many learning hours does your commute actually hold?

The headline number most guides repeat is 200 hours a year, pinned to a twenty-five minute one-way commute done five days a week for forty-eight working weeks. That number is accurate, but it is only accurate for the roughly one in five American workers who still go into an office every weekday. Among remote-capable US workers, Gallup’s Global Indicator on hybrid work finds that 21 percent work exclusively on-site, 52 percent are hybrid two to four days a week, and 27 percent are fully remote (remote-capable employees only). The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey reports the average one-way commute at 26.4 minutes, roughly where it sat before the pandemic for those who do commute.

The usable figure for you is whatever your schedule actually looks like. Multiply your round-trip commute by your real commute days per week, then multiply by forty-eight working weeks. Adjust downward if you already listen to something else (music, calls, podcasts you do not count as learning) and upward if you are willing to add a deliberate walk on non-commute days. The numbers are larger than most people guess.

Schedule	Round-trip per day	Days per week	Annual hours (48 weeks)	Equivalent audiobooks (8 hrs each)
Five-day in-office	50 minutes	5	200 hours	~25 books
Four-day hybrid	50 minutes	4	160 hours	~20 books
Three-day hybrid	50 minutes	3	120 hours	~15 books
Two-day hybrid	50 minutes	2	80 hours	~10 books
Remote with deliberate 20-min walk	20 minutes	5	80 hours	~10 books
Long-commute daily driver	90 minutes	5	360 hours	~45 books

Eighty hours is still a meaningful budget. That is enough to finish ten audiobooks, or to cover a full language-learning course, or to follow a weekly industry podcast for the entire year with time left over. The point of the table is to stop the universal 200-hour claim that made the old version of this advice feel dishonest for anyone whose schedule did not match it.

Does listening during your commute actually count as learning?

Virginia Clinton-Lisell’s 2022 meta-analysis in Review of Educational Research pooled 46 studies comparing reading and listening comprehension and found no reliable overall difference between the two modalities for most content. Adults who listened to content and adults who read the same content performed similarly on comprehension tests. Clinton-Lisell’s own interpretation flagged a small advantage for reading when the text was complex, inferential, or when the reader could control pacing, but the headline finding was that listening is a legitimate learning channel for most material most of the time.

On the safety question specifically, Michael Gottlieb and colleagues ran a randomized crossover trial with emergency medicine residents in 2021, published in Annals of Emergency Medicine. Residents listened to educational podcasts either during driving or while sitting undistracted and were tested immediately and one month later.

“Listening while driving did not meaningfully reduce immediate or one-month knowledge retention compared with undistracted listening.”

Gottlieb et al., 2021, Annals of Emergency Medicine

Two caveats are worth stating plainly. The Gottlieb et al. participants were emergency medicine residents, a specialized population trained to operate under cognitive load. Generalizing to a tired office worker in rush-hour traffic is defensible but not certain. And the trial used routine driving conditions, not demanding ones. On a bad weather day, on a complicated unfamiliar route, or when traffic is unusually heavy, the cognitive budget shifts and the listening becomes background noise at best and a distraction at worst. The honest summary is that listening while driving under normal conditions does not seem to meaningfully cost you either your learning or your safety, but neither is guaranteed when the road conditions change.

Reading retains an edge for dense, inferential material and anything you want to reread twice. Self-paced reading allows you to slow for complex passages and revisit confusing sections. Fixed-speed audio does offer rewind and variable playback, but the flexibility is coarser. For narrative nonfiction, interviews, explanatory content, most language learning, and news analysis, audio holds up well.

How to pick the right content for your commute

The two-variable decision is length and mode. Length tells you whether to pick an audiobook (long, continuous), a podcast (episodic, any length), or a book-summary service (short, compressed). Mode tells you how much cognitive slack the content can take up without compromising safety or absorption.

The length rule

Audiobooks are narrated full-length books, running four to twenty hours, following a planned arc. The audiobook format suits commutes of thirty minutes or more, where you can make meaningful daily progress without constantly losing the thread. Audiobooks reward depth on a single topic and patience across weeks.

Podcasts are episodic audio programs where individual episodes run fifteen to ninety minutes and most episodes stand alone. The podcast format fits any commute length and particularly shines on shorter rides, where finishing something in one session beats constantly pausing mid-content.

Book-summary services deliver compressed twelve-to-twenty-minute audio digests of full books, emphasizing core arguments over narrative. These fit short commutes and work as a scouting tool to decide which full audiobooks deserve your time. They do not replace the audiobook for anything you intend to apply.

Audiobooks vs. podcasts: side-by-side

Factor	Audiobooks	Podcasts
Depth of coverage	Deep treatment of one topic	Breadth across many topics
Ideal commute length	30+ minutes (continuity matters)	Any length (episodes scale)
Best content types	Skill-building, memoirs, narrative nonfiction	Interviews, news analysis, how-to series
Cost model	Purchase, subscription credit, or library loan	Mostly free, optional premium tiers
Currency	Books lag the news by months or years	Weekly or daily shows track the news
Commitment required	High; you are starting a 10-hour project	Low; each episode is its own unit

Content-goal matrix: commute length by learning goal

Learning goal	Short commute (under 20 min)	Medium commute (20-45 min)	Long commute (45+ min)
Deep skill building	Book-summary service (scout mode)	Audiobook, one chapter per ride	Audiobook, two chapters per ride
Industry currency	Short podcast episodes (daily news)	Interview podcasts, weekly analysis	Interview podcasts plus a reserve audiobook
Language learning	Repetition-focused language apps	Mixed: 15 min app, then target-language podcast	Language podcast for active listening, target-language storytelling for passive
Leadership and career	Short-form leadership podcast	Audiobook on a single leadership theme	Audiobook morning, relevant interview evening
Rest and recovery	Silence or light music	Silence or light music, maybe a story podcast	Silence for half the ride, then narrative fiction

Rest is a legitimate column. Some commutes should remain quiet. A nervous-system reset on the drive home can be worth more than any additional chapter, and treating every transit as a learning marathon is a reliable recipe for burnout.

The Deliberate Listening Window: a named routine for any schedule

The window concept exists to solve the hybrid problem. A traditional commute-learning routine is cue-based: when you start the car, you press play. When your commute disappears three days a week, the cue goes with it, and the habit dies. The Deliberate Listening Window abstracts the cue away from the physical commute. The cue becomes whatever signals the start of your learning block, whether that is a real commute, a planned walk before work, or a Saturday morning errand run.

Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran’s 2006 meta-analysis of implementation intentions, published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, found that pre-committed if-then plans produce two to three times the follow-through of general motivation alone.

“Implementation intentions specify when, where, and how a goal will be pursued, increasing follow-through by 2-3x compared to motivation alone.”

Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006

Write your window as one if-then sentence. “If it is Tuesday and I am driving to the office, then I press play on my current audiobook as soon as I start the engine.” “If it is Thursday and I am working from home, then I walk twenty minutes after breakfast with my language app running.” Both are valid, both are repeatable, and both convert a fuzzy intention into a single decision made in advance.

The window checklist

• Write the cue as a specific if-then sentence tied to something that already happens in your day.
• Pre-queue one piece of content before the window starts; no live menu browsing at the wheel.
• Set a default playback speed once and leave it alone unless the material demands otherwise.
• Close the window with a two-minute recall ritual as soon as you arrive or finish the walk.
• Schedule a ten-minute weekly review to scan your capture notes and adjust the queue.
• Allow a silent-window day on your calendar; the routine should survive intentional rest.

How cognitive load changes by commute mode

Driving, riding transit, and walking each impose different attentional costs. Paul Atchley’s research on driver attention and Paul Ward’s work on dual-task performance converge on a simple picture: the more your mode of transport consumes visual and motor attention, the less cognitive room you have left for absorbing complex audio. A train rider can give most of the episode their full attention. A driver in light traffic can absorb roughly the same amount if the content is familiar in format (narrative, conversational) but less if it requires inference-heavy reasoning. A driver in heavy traffic or bad weather has almost no audio bandwidth left. A walker is somewhere between the driver and the rider, with the added constraint that they need to stay aware of traffic at crossings.

The rule of thumb is that the content should be one notch simpler than whatever you would choose to read in a quiet room. If you would read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow at home, pick a Kahneman interview podcast for the car and save the dense text for the weekend. If you would read a business memoir at home, an audiobook version of the same memoir will usually fit the drive. Match the format to the headroom you have.

Mode	Cognitive slack	Best content complexity	Safety caveat
Driving (light traffic)	Moderate	Narrative, conversational, familiar-format	Pause for merging, heavy weather, unfamiliar routes
Driving (heavy traffic)	Low	Light podcasts, music, or silence	Full attention belongs to the road
Train or bus (seated)	High	Anything, including dense material	Stay aware of your stop
Train or bus (standing)	Moderate	Narrative audio, conversational interviews	Share situational awareness with the ride
Walking	Moderate	Conversational, narrative, language apps	Lower volume at intersections; bone-conduction headphones help
Cycling	Low	Light podcasts or no audio at all	Prioritize traffic awareness; keep one ear open

Playback speed and the comprehension ceiling

Faster is not always better. Research on time-compressed speech summarized by Ronald Cole and others has consistently shown that most listeners can comprehend speech at 1.5 times the normal rate with minimal loss for familiar, conversational material. Past 1.75x, comprehension drops noticeably. Past 2x, most listeners are effectively skimming, catching keywords and missing the argument. Complex material with heavy jargon or inferential reasoning shows comprehension drops earlier, sometimes as low as 1.25x.

A sensible default is 1.2x for unfamiliar material and 1.5x for familiar content and conversational podcasts. Pocket Casts and Overcast both offer trim-silence features that remove pauses without changing pitch and are commonly reported to reduce episode length by ten to twenty percent, which adds effective speed without the comprehension cost of raw playback acceleration. Trim-silence features let you absorb more content during the same commute without pushing past the comprehension ceiling.

• Set 1.0x to 1.2x for dense audiobooks on unfamiliar technical topics.
• Set 1.25x to 1.5x for narrative nonfiction, memoirs, and business books.
• Set 1.5x to 1.75x for conversational interview podcasts you already follow.
• Turn trim-silence on always; it is free speed.
• Avoid 2x+ except for re-listening or for content where you only need the gist.

Best audiobook and podcast apps for commute learning

The right app matters less than the routine, but the wrong app will still create friction. These are the apps that most often earn their keep for commute learners, with an honest note on when each one is the wrong choice.

Audiobook apps

App	Pricing	Best for	Key features
Audible	Subscription (~$15/month, one credit)	Largest catalog, exclusive titles	Offline download, variable speed, Whispersync
Libby	Free with a library card	Budget-conscious learners	Library loans, no cost, offline listening
Libro.fm	Subscription (~$15/month)	Readers who want to support indie bookstores	Credits route to local bookshops, DRM-free
Google Play Books	Pay per book	Occasional listeners	No subscription, Google ecosystem
Everand (Scribd)	Unlimited subscription (~$12/month)	Voracious, variety-driven listeners	Unlimited audiobooks, ebooks, magazines

Libby deserves special mention for budget-conscious learners. A free library card gets you thousands of audiobooks. Hold times for popular titles can run a few weeks, so queue three or four books in advance instead of expecting immediate access. Everand (the rebranded Scribd) is the best unlimited option if you rotate formats a lot and want magazines and ebooks alongside audiobooks.

Podcast apps

App	Cost	Best for	Standout features
Spotify	Free (premium optional)	Music-and-podcast combo listeners	Personalized recommendations, offline with premium
Apple Podcasts	Free	iOS and Mac users	Apple integration, automatic downloads, transcripts
Pocket Casts	Free (premium $4/month)	Power users	Trim silence, variable speed, cross-platform sync
Overcast	Free (premium optional)	Audio quality obsessives	Smart Speed removes pauses, Voice Boost normalizes
YouTube Music	Free	Android users	Video-first podcasts, Google ecosystem

Book-summary and language apps

• Blinkist: twelve-to-fifteen minute nonfiction summaries. Best as a scouting tool.
• Shortform: longer, more detailed guides than Blinkist; closer to half an audiobook.
• Pimsleur: audio-first language learning, thirty-minute lessons designed for hands-free use.
• Language Transfer: free, teacher-led audio language courses tuned for walking and driving.
• LingQ: reading plus listening; works better on transit where you can also glance at a phone.

App setup tips

• Enable automatic downloads over Wi-Fi so content is already on the device when the window starts.
• Build two playlists: a morning list of focused content and an evening list of lighter material.
• Set a default playback speed in advance and turn trim-silence on.
• Pair with Bluetooth, CarPlay, or Android Auto for hands-free control; never scroll while driving.
• Use bone-conduction headphones for walking or cycling so you can still hear traffic.

How to design a routine you will actually follow

The difference between people who learn during their commute and people who keep meaning to comes down to whether the behavior runs on autopilot. Good intentions fade when every morning starts with a fresh decision. Habits, by contrast, skip the decision. Wendy Wood and colleagues’ often-cited 2002 study of daily habits, later replicated in subsequent reviews, estimated that about 43 percent of daily actions repeat in stable contexts with little conscious deliberation. When you pair a behavior (pressing play on learning content) with a stable cue (starting the commute), the behavior gradually becomes automatic.

Mode-specific setups

Drivers. Safety is non-negotiable. Pre-queue content before you start the engine. Set playback speed in advance. Use voice controls or steering-wheel buttons for any adjustment during driving. Keep volume at a level that lets you hear emergency vehicles and horns. Pause the audio when merging, in heavy weather, or on any route you have not driven in the last month.

Transit riders. You have more flexibility. Seated riders can absorb dense material, take light notes, or read along with a language app. Standing riders should pick narrative audio and conserve cognitive slack for balance and situational awareness. Noise-cancelling headphones help on loud trains, but keep environmental awareness high enough to notice your stop.

Walkers and cyclists. Lower the volume at intersections. Bone-conduction headphones or single-earbud setups preserve situational awareness. Cyclists should consider whether audio at all is safe on their route; in dense urban traffic, silence is often the smarter choice.

Remote workers. See the fake-commute section below. The short version is that you will need to build the cue yourself, because the physical trigger does not exist.

From listening to remembering: the two-minute recall ritual

The common mistake is to put the effort into listening and none into remembering. Gondy Leroy and David Kauchak’s 2019 study in JAMIA Open found that listeners understood health information about as well as readers, but they recalled fewer specific details when asked to reproduce the material without cues. The information goes in. It does not always stick.

Active recall means trying to retrieve information without looking at the source. Jeffrey Karpicke and Janell Blunt’s 2011 Science paper showed that this effortful retrieval strengthens memory traces far more than re-reading or re-listening. A two-minute recall ritual at the end of every Deliberate Listening Window turns a passive absorption session into a learning one.

The two-minute recall, step by step

• When you park, step off the train, or close the front door after a walk, pause before opening email.
• Ask yourself three questions in your head: what was the main idea, what surprised me, what do I want to try.
• Record a thirty-to-sixty-second voice memo answering those three questions out loud.
• Save the memo to a single commute-learning folder in your notes app.
• Do not write the full notes in the moment; the voice memo is the capture, not the archive.

Post-commute capture template

Weekly review of capture notes

Once a week, spend ten minutes scanning your voice memos and capture notes. Look for patterns. Which ideas keep returning? Which actions did you actually try? This is where scattered listening turns into directed learning, and where you can decide which content belongs in next week’s queue. For more on the mechanics of a working review, see the guide to weekly review and planning sessions.

For remote workers: building a deliberate fake commute

If you work from home, the easy temptation is to roll out of bed, open the laptop, and skip anything resembling a commute. That works for a while. It also quietly deletes one of the best recurring learning slots most people have ever had. The fake-commute solution is not about pretending to go somewhere. It is about keeping the window even when the transit does not exist.

Bas Verplanken and colleagues’ 2008 research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology on travel-mode changes found that when commuting patterns shift, the habit-disruption effect creates a window where new behaviors can be installed or lost. For remote workers, the change already happened. The question is whether the window gets filled on purpose.

The fake-commute recipe

• Pick a physical trigger that already happens. Closing the front door after breakfast, finishing the first cup of coffee, or putting on a specific pair of walking shoes works better than a time-based alarm.
• Commit to twenty minutes of walking or one circuit of your neighborhood. The walk is the commute. Consistency beats duration; a daily twenty-minute loop beats an occasional forty-minute one.
• Queue one piece of content the night before. If the decision has to be made in the moment, the habit will eventually lose to social feeds.
• Close the loop with the two-minute recall. Do the voice memo before you open the laptop.
• Treat it as a workday marker, not a workout. Walking a slow loop counts. The point is the audio window, not fitness.

Hybrid workers get the hardest version of this. Office days run on the real commute cue; home days run on the fake-commute cue. The two rituals have to be close enough that missing the physical commute does not feel like a skipped day. The simplest way is to keep the content queue the same on both day types, so the only variable is whether the walk replaces the drive. For more on this kind of habit design, see the article on habit formation techniques and the guide to habit stacking, which pair well with the window concept.

When not to listen: the case for a quiet commute

Not every commute should carry content. Three cases make silence the better call. First, when safety demands the full attention budget: heavy traffic, bad weather, unfamiliar routes, or a cyclist on a busy road. Second, when your nervous system is already at capacity; the drive home after a draining meeting is not the moment to start a dense audiobook. Third, when you have been inputting content heavily all week and your capture notes are piling up without review; a silent commute can become the unplanned review slot.

Designate at least one silent-window day per week in advance. On a five-day commute, Wednesday evenings often work because the midweek drain is real. On a three-day hybrid schedule, one of the two or three commute days is enough. Putting the silent day on the calendar stops it from being a guilt-laden lapse and makes it a routine feature.

Common mistakes that waste commute learning

A worked example: Sarah, hybrid marketing lead

Sarah works in marketing and drives thirty minutes each way to her office three days a week. She has two young children, so evenings disappear into dinner, homework, and bedtime. Her round-trip commute on office days is sixty minutes. Across forty-eight working weeks at three days a week, she has 144 hours of commute time a year. On her two home-office days, she adds a twenty-minute walk after breakfast, which gives her another eighty hours. Her total Deliberate Listening Window budget is 224 hours a year.

She picks two tracks. A leadership audiobook runs during morning drives and walks, with trim-silence on and playback at 1.25x. A weekly marketing podcast fills evening drives and home-day afternoon walks. Her if-then sentence is simple: “If I am starting my car or closing the front door after breakfast, then I press play on my current track.” When she parks or finishes the walk, she records a one-minute voice memo covering main idea, surprise, and one thing to try. Wednesday evenings are her designated silent-window day; she uses the drive to decompress.

After a quarter, Sarah has finished five audiobooks and listened to thirty-nine podcast episodes. More importantly, her capture folder has about fifty voice memos. Twelve of them led to concrete experiments at work. The other thirty-eight were still the point, because they kept the habit alive.

Ramon’s take

Ramon Landes here. I spent years commuting into a Medtech office in Switzerland before the hybrid shift, and the single biggest mistake I made with audio learning was treating it as free extra hours rather than as a small daily slot that needed its own rules. I used to stack Audible credits with dense economics books and feel smug about my “200 hours a year” as if that math were a guarantee. It is not. The math is real but the retention curve is not automatic. What finally worked was pairing every commute with a parking-lot voice memo before I opened Slack. Two minutes. Sometimes ninety seconds. The memo was usually bad. It did not matter. The act of trying to remember is the whole trick.

The other thing I got wrong was pushing playback speed. I ran at 1.75x for a while and felt clever about it, right up until a colleague asked what I thought of the argument in chapter four and I realized I had absorbed the beats but not the logic. I dropped back to 1.2x for new material and 1.5x for interviews and conversational material. The chapters started sticking. Speed is not free.

Since the shift to hybrid, my commute window is shorter and irregular, and I have come to rely on a deliberate morning walk on home days. Twenty minutes, same route, same listening queue. The walk is dull, the audio is good, and the routine has outlasted every other productivity experiment I have run in the last five years. If I had to compress this entire article into one piece of advice: protect the window, not the mileage. The commute is just the easiest excuse to have one.

One honest caveat. Noisy urban transit is a real problem the research does not fully address. Swiss trams and German S-Bahns are clean, fast, and pleasant. The New York subway and São Paulo metro are not. On noisy rides, I drop to conversational podcasts, move the dense audiobooks to the car or the walk, and accept that not every commute mode hosts the same window equally well. If your commute is loud enough that you are straining to hear, do your learning somewhere else and use the ride for music or rest. The system is supposed to serve the learning, not the other way around.

Frequently asked questions

Your next ten minutes and your first week

Right now (the next 10 minutes):

• Calculate your real annual commute window using the schedule table above.
• Pick one learning theme for the next month (leadership, language, industry, or recovery).
• Download one audiobook or podcast app and queue one piece of content.
• Write one if-then sentence for your Deliberate Listening Window and put it on your recurring calendar.

This week (the first 7 days):

• Pre-download a week of content over Wi-Fi; never decide in the car.
• Run the two-minute recall ritual after at least three commutes or walks.
• Schedule a ten-minute Friday review to scan your voice memos.
• Pick one idea from the week’s listening and apply it in a real situation.
• Book a silent-window day on the calendar; the routine should allow intentional rest.

There is more to explore

If this guide resonated, the parent time management techniques complete guide sits one level up and treats the whole week as the unit, of which the Deliberate Listening Window is one recurring slot. For content selection, personal development podcasts for professionals goes deeper into the podcast lineup worth following; for the habit plumbing behind the window, habit formation techniques and habit stacking unpack the mechanics that make a cue stick. When the routine feels more like a marathon than a rhythm, goal-setting frameworks helps you pick one learning theme per quarter rather than ten at once.

Beyond the immediate silo, weekly review and planning turns the capture-note pile into a review that actually changes next week’s queue, and the wider picture of focus lives in the deep work strategies guide. A quieter commute is sometimes the better call; digital minimalism for knowledge workers makes the case for less input, not more. The common thread across all of these is that a learning window only works if it fits the shape of your week, and every article listed here is one way of holding that shape steady.

References

1. U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). Commuting in the United States: 2022. American Community Survey Briefs, ACSBR-018. census.gov
2. Gallup. (2025). Global Indicator: Hybrid Work. gallup.com
3. Clinton-Lisell, V. (2022). Listening ears or reading eyes: A meta-analysis of reading and listening comprehension comparisons. Review of Educational Research, 92(4), 543-582. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211060871
4. Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2016). Does modality matter? The effects of reading, listening, and dual modality on comprehension. SAGE Open, 6(3), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244016669550
5. Leroy, G., & Kauchak, D. (2019). A comparison of text versus audio for information comprehension with future uses for smart speakers. JAMIA Open, 2(2), 254-260. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamiaopen/ooz011
6. Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772-775. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199327
7. Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1281-1297. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.1281
8. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
9. Gottlieb, M., Riddell, J., Cooney, R., King, A., Fung, C.-C., & Sherbino, J. (2021). Maximizing the morning commute: A randomized trial assessing the effect of driving on podcast knowledge acquisition and retention. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 78(3), 416-424. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2021.02.030
10. Verplanken, B., Walker, I., Davis, A., & Jurasek, M. (2008). Context change and travel mode choice: Combining the habit discontinuity and self-activation hypotheses. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 28(2), 121-127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2007.10.005