如何更有效地閱讀

如何更有效地閱讀
How to Read More Effectively
JULY 22, 2018
Whether you’re dissecting Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or relaxing poolside with 50 Shades of Grey, reading is, for many of us, a regular source of joy, perspective, and ideas, which enable us to grow personally and professionally. But here’s the catch: We live in a world of never ending content and constant competition for our attention. One study, back in 2009, found that we’re exposed to 100,000 words each day, the equivalent of one quarter of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. And that was before most of us started using our phones for reading texts, emails, or articles instead of just for talking.

If you’re spending up to two hours a day on social media, as the average American now does, then you know that technology plays the role of both obstacle and ally in our quest to read more. In this guide, we explore how to use technology (along with several analog strategies) to your advantage, to pick what you read, and to incorporate the ideas you read about into your life.

Set up yourself up to succeed

If you assume a reading speed of 350 words per minute, it would require just 20 minutes of reading per day to read roughly a book each week. So reading doesn’t have to require a lot of time.

But reading effectively requires a good setup, or as chefs would call it the mise-en-place. Here’s where the technology surrounding us can be used to our advantage. Start by putting your old iPads, iPhones, and Kindles to work. Download the Kindle app on each of them and scatter these old devices around your home. Turn on the wi-fi, and you’ll never be more than a few feet from your most recently synched page. If your budget allows it, extend that approach by going “multi-medium.” For example, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris buys both physical and Kindle copies of whatever he’s reading. Melting Asphalt blogger Kevin Simler prefers the Audiobook-and-Kindle combo, and AngelList founder Naval Ravikant flat out buys multiple physical copies just to “have them lying around the house.” Now there’s no excuse.

Triage and curation are important

Now that we’re set up, the next question is figuring out what to read. This isn’t an easy question to answer—the publishing industry puts out more than 50,000 new books a year, plus there’s all the great writing that the world’s bookshelves have accumulated since the first works of literature were written more than 4,000 years ago. RibbonFarm blogger Venkatesh Rao believes that deciding what not to read is critical since “every book you consciously decide not to read increases what you’ll get out of the ones you do read.”

Patrick O’Shaughnessy, host of the Invest Like the Best podcast host, focuses on books with unique ideas, using Joseph Campbell’s rule of thumb that “the fewer citations, the better the book.” O’Shaughnessy looks for books that use “proprietary data” which to him might include anecdotal information about experiences or conversations, or actual data that isn’t publicly accessible.

Personally, I use a simpler approach that taps into the diversity of ideas in my network. If a book is recommended to me by three friends from three distinct professional circles, I move it up to the front of the queue. It’s a nice, if unscientific, reminder that the universe is conspiring for me to read that book.

Find the right reading strategy


https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/07/how-read-more-effectively/149936/