I listen to lots of novels and podcasts during my long commute or when I'm doing chores, the types of mindless activities you are normally doing idle thinking.

I listen to lots of novels and podcasts during my long commute or when I'm doing chores, the types of mindless activities you are normally doing idle thinking. It's more difficult to pay attention to them when I'm driving in heavy city traffic but it's easy on the highway. It's really easy to wash dishes, fold laundry, or vacuum when listening to something. I mostly like doing novels with lots of narrative prose because it's hard to listen to something like a self-help or technical subject audiobook when you can't easily reread a sentence or quickly look at a diagram. Having long blocks of narrative prose let you miss some things when your attention wanders rather than missing dialogue where you may miss some important part of the story. Books that do rely on visual aids include PDFs for you to browse but that's very difficult to do unless you are just sitting down doing absolutely nothing. When I was working from home everyday at the start of the pandemic, I was building up a large backlog of podcasts and was not able to keep up with audiobooks I had rented from my local library through Overdrive.