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2271 sats \ 5 replies \ @Coyote_Cosmico 14 Jan \ on: What's your "ritual" for reading a book smoothly? BooksAndArticles
1 - "Bookend" the day. Reading first thing in the morning (especially before going online in any fashion) and then reading at night before sleep.
2 - Decide how long you'll read for, set a timer, and read until it beeps. Even if you're getting distracted and feeling the pull to go do something else, looking at the timer and knowing you've got just a few more minutes can help you resist that pull.
When you get used to that you'll also feel less of those little distracting thoughts. You train your mind that it's reading time, and all the things will still be there waiting for you when the timer goes off.
3 - Have multiple books going at once, ideally different genres and topics. I recently started this and it's been fantastic. If you encounter resistance reading something because you're just not in the right mental space, there's no need to force it. Just pop over to another book which feels smoother in that moment.
Also if your day is busy like you mentioned, some books are more suitable for short sessions than others, so it helps to have at least one of those on hand. If you have 5 or 10 minutes to spare you can more easily pop in and out of a fiction book than something like, "Introduction to General Systems Thinking." Doesn't have to be fiction though, some books just lend themselves better to short breaks throughout the day.
4 - Highlighting and rereading. I want to digest the material and maybe hold it up for scrutiny - to decide how, why, if and where it fits in to the knowledge and models in my head. But I don't want to get bogged down every other page in analysis or detailed note taking.
When I find a passage that deserves some attention, I'll just highlight it or take a quick shorthand note and keep moving. Because I've built the habit of circling back to these highlights and doing a deeper read later, I trust that I can safely move on.
Highlighting and rereading.
I'm not a believer in highlighting, at least for myself, since what happens when I do it is that I accrue a series of things that I vaguely intend to come back to one day; and yet that day never comes, because there's always more to read.
What works better for me is to "read at the speed of synthesis" where I take a lot of notes in the course of reading, where "notes" really is: my reactions to things, digging into them, asking questions, etc. Then these notes get put into the rotation of things that I review periodically. (I have tools to help with this so the review actually happens.) This is much slower and thus serves as a rate-limiter of what I attempt to read.
The key is to know what it is you're after. I have read thousands of books that now, years later, I have only the illusion-of-knowing about. Since my goal is to engage with the book, and be changed by it, interactions that don't afford that are useless to me. It's just LARPing, bedpost-notching.
Not saying this is right for everyone, just what I do.
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I totally relate to what you wrote here. Started to get frustrated that I couldn't really speak intelligently on most of the books I'd been reading, even though I felt like they impacted me while I read them.
I think in some way they still do leave an imprint, even if I can't remember details, but vague impressions aren't what I'm after either.
I'm still figuring this out and you're right it's really easy to intend to come back and read highlights and never get around to it. What I'm doing now is doing the reread after I finish a chapter, that way it actually happens.
Curious what tools you use for your reviews? I've been using Readwise for a long time and I like it a lot, but what it surfaces is fairly random.
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Curious what tools you use for your reviews? I've been using Readwise for a long time and I like it a lot, but what it surfaces is fairly random.
It's an ornate and bespoke toolchain, but it basically has Anki at the heart of it. A lot of people obsess over the scheduling algorithm (in fact, some are obsessing about it today) but it's more than good enough for my weird use case.
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This sounds intriguing. I use Anki for Spanish now but have daydreamed about the power it could have for reading retention. It's always seemed daunting to figure out how to build a system to make this a smooth process but I guess these things are created brick by brick.
Consider doing a write up here on your system sometime? I'm sure many could get a ton of value from it.
Actually maybe I'll do a bounty post about this and try to crowdsource the methods stackers use for knowledge management. Seems like the problem of our time, how to best use the ridiculous amount of information we're all exposed to now.
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Yeah, i'll definitely start reading in the morning and evening on a steady basis, I won't, however, start reading multiple books at once.
I like to focus on one book at a time, and sometimes read it a second time while making notes and working said notes out with further research.
Fine comment though.