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1681 sats \ 3 replies \ @tolot 26 Aug \ on: How have you increased your reading rate? BooksAndArticles
As for programming, garbage in-garbage out.
Garbage is not only content, but also form. If you hurry through books, you tend to process nothing and from nothing can only come out...nothing. Best case scenario, you get out with a very fragmented knowledge of the topic.
Throughout the years I started accepting the idea that reading books is my little rest time interval in the day, my hole during the sandstorm.
I only commit to x minutes every day, generally half an hour. That can be at home, in the bus, during a queque. I started buying "pocket-sized" books if available...they're way better than flipping social media profiles.
Then, commit to writing down what you understood, something new you learned, crazy thoughts you formulated during the day. I usually do it at night, before bed, in a paper notebook. That's better than looking at a computer screen late at night and a good old pen in my hand makes me feel more productive.
Pliny the Elder used to say Nulla dies sine linea, which litterally means "no day without a line". The line is what you write down, what you extracted from your day. Being it happy news or bad news, a complex reasoning or simply the day reporting. The compounded effect of this approach is faboulous, at least in my opinion and experience.
I didn't actually answer you question probably because I suggested more writing as a solution to not sufficient reading. My experience is that when you sit in front of an empty sheet of paper, your brain is forced to find something to write. If you don't have any, you're better off going out and read some useful stuff. Also, nowadays reading tends to consumption, which makes it as listening to music on Spotify or watching YT videos: just an another way to go through time and get dopamine pumps.
I don't want that, I'm running away from it. Thus, I try to embrace slowness.
Sadly, a lot of content is online and a lot of brilliant content is in online blogs...with these I try to:
a) print them out and read them in paper form
b) send them to my remarkable and read them there
Both techniques lead to same result, but I tend to separate pleasure reading (novels/essays etc) and work-related readings (like papers). My remarkable is increasingly useful with regards to papers reading, thus I try to avoid it for pleasure readings. I understood that routines are also made of tools, If I read a novel with my remarkable, I tend to then associate the research and work time with the pleasure time, and that is not productive.
Audiobooks are brilliant, I just happen to have not so many hours a week of driving or otherwise wasted time I would use for reading. Therefore, I don'tuse them, also because I associate them with digital devices, that are a source of distraction for my brain.
I want to close this with a suggestion a friend of mine gave me ages ago:
I love how you dissect my question from so many angles. Pls accept my bounty, albeit delayed.
If you write a line about what you learnt from the book, do you also journal about your day at the same time? If yes, is that too much writing for you?
I like writing and am always interested to know others’ writing habits
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Glad to hear that you liked the answer!!
I tend to have periods in which I do journal-only writings and some others during which I tend to write more abstact stuff. Overall, that's not more than 15/20 minutes of writing session. I don't considef it too much, although sometimes I stop way before the 15 minutes (particularly if the day was a boring day). Unfortunately I understood too late the importance of writing routines, thus I now simply try to keep up with the "action" of writing, the content often flows as a consequence. I'm now going through a particularly dense period with regards to feelings, emotions and understanding of myself: that habit helps me writing down what otherwise would be simply random noise in my brain. That's terapeutic more than anything else.
The balance journaling-thoughts is often associated with the kind of books I'm reading during that specific period. Novels trigger my journaling tendency more than essays, whereas essays tend to trigger some reasonings related to the essay topic. Overall I always try to put in some journaling words anyways...I like the idea of being able to retrieve feelings that I had in the past. To me it's like having a shelf full of freezed timestamps, like insects in amber.
I don't have a standardized way in which I organize my writings...they're sort of "lines lakes" where I throw stuff. When I feel that a specific topic is taking too much room in my journaling notebook, I move to markdown files and I try to form an organic and more organized short article about that topic.
As of now I don't publish stuff I wrote because I see that as too personal, I may change idea in the future. Writing only for myself makes writing a rest activity, If I where to publish stuff I would have to edit and rewrite most of the things I wrote.
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