First things first: I became tired of writing semi-daily summaries on books I’ve been reading. If you care to look back, I didn’t get very far. The reason? I just didn’t see the point. They weren’t helpful. I’m more interested in discussing the main idea or the more interesting aspects of each book. My next strategy is to write about those. Coming up:
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Getting Things Done by David Allen
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
The Dip by Seth Godin
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
Lot’s of books. I’ve read most within that list already, I just haven’t gotten around to writing about my thoughts for each semi-eloquently. It’s all scribbles and mind-maps in my Moleskine at this point.
Otherwise, I’ve been working on software development skills, learning Vim once and for all (switching from TextMate), and learning Clojure for a rewrite and significant enhancement of integration software currently written in Ruby.
And once my system is fixed and everything organized once again, I should have many, many photography updates as well. This excites me …
Technical reading. Technical material is material “with unfamiliar vocabulary or terminology, numbers or statistics you must know, or completely new information.” Day 9 of 10 Days to Faster Reading teaches us how to better read technical material.
The explained suggestions include:
Pre-view
Become familiar with unfamiliar terms
Identify your purpose and responsbility
Look for 5W’s and H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How)
Modify a faster reading strategy
Re-view
The book’s content is becoming a review of everything previously discussed, with a few little helpful hints thrown in here and there. On to the tool of the day.
The tool of the day is referred to as “the thumb push.” The thumb push is very similar to the white card method discussed in day 1, but using your fist instead of a white card. I’ll leave it up to you to figure it out, and if for some crazy reason you can’t, buy the book! Or just buy it anyway, it’s worth it if you want to improve your reading skills.
In Ramit Sethi’s personal finance book entitled I Will Teach You to Be Rich, he discusses the importance of keeping track of customer support call information. I’ve been doing this for years in a web-application called Backpack. Great idea, great tool.
The mere thought of tracking customer support call information might be considered anal-retentive to many. But, truth is, having that information available is incredibly powerful. When a customer rep tells you “we don’t have a record of you ever asking us to remove that late fee, and no, we can no longer remove it because it’s been 30 days since the charge was incurred,” being able to refer back to previous calls, dates, times, names of reps, is POWERFUL stuff. Don’t be surprised if they immediately back off and start playing nicely — that’s exactly what will happen.
Of course you could use pen and paper to record this information, but the great thing about Backpack is that it’s available any time, from any computer with internet access, anywhere in the world. Keeping track of more than just customer support call information is a great idea too (some of those I’ll be discussing in later posts).
My strategy for keeping track of customer support call information is to keep it all in one Backpack page. I’ve created a Backpack page named “Call Logs” and then created a note for every company whose support call information I want to track. Within the note, I use the following bit of marked-up text as a table header:
|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|
When creating a new entry in reference to a call, it might look something like this:
|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|
And the whole note, after several entries, might look something like this:
|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|
|2008.07.23|4pm|Allison|123|Asked to remove late fee (I forgot to pay), they removed, offer one a year|
|2008.08.15|2pm|Steven|---|Noticed that late fee was never removed, reluctant to remove at first, but after discussing details of July 23rd call with Steven, he finally noticed the call in the system and happily removed the late fee, apologizing for the mistake|
|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|
The end result looks much better:
Backpack is a great tool, and incredibly useful for staying organized and keeping track of all sorts of things. Try it out!
Knowing your purpose (Day 3) and applying pre-viewing (Day 5) are the key factors for determining your overdrive speeds: skimming, scanning, or skipping.
What factors affect your reading speed? There are several, all explained in Day 8 of 10 Days to Faster Reading:
purpose and responsibility
pre-viewing
background knowledge
noise level
distractions and interruptions
time factor
time of day
physical condition
using a speed technique
location
temperature and lighting
interest
column width and print size
author’s style
The idea is to “take as much control over your reading material, reading time, and physical environment as possible to make your reading experience as efficient and as effective as possible.” Basically, if you really want to learn something, it’s probably not smart to read while the kids are fighting over who gets to play what video game, while the dogs are barking at the kids acting all kinds of crazy, and while your significant other is in the room not doing anything about it. Or if your single without all of the above wonderfulness, don’t read and expect to learn much while the TV is on your favorite show and you’re about to fall asleep.
Read in the best conditions and your experience will be as efficient and as effective as possible.
Three reading techniques (or “not reading” techniques) will help speed you along: skimming, scanning, and skipping. Day 8 describes each of these techniques in detail and provides exercises for the skimming and scanning techniques. Abby Marks-Beale could have included an exercise for skipping, but chances are you’ll skip it.
Use skimming when you’re looking for the main idea. Use scanning when you’re looking for something specific. Use skipping when the material is familiar or irrelevant.
The absolute best part of this chapter is the following:
Always identify your purpose for reading. Remember that without knowing why you are on the road, you waste time, get lost, and become frustrated.
Pre-view everything you read. Pre-viewing gives you the background knowledge to decide whether the reading is worth your time and helps you refine your purpose.
Overcome your fear of missing material. There is more than enough reading material to last a lifetime and your job is to q-u-i-c-k-l-y find what is mot valuable to you.
I have a good reason for constantly referring to the ideas of defining a purpose and pre-viewing everything you read: it helps! Since I began to seriously study this book, I’ve recognized the good things and bad things about my reading technique. I’ve always been good at skimming, scanning, and skipping, but as for defining a purpose and pre-viewing? Nope!
I’ve been making a conscious effort to define a purpose and pre-view everything I read. It helps tremendously. I still haven’t fully overcome my fear of missing material, but I’m working on it.
The tool of the day is referred to as the “finger snake.” This one works best on narrow-columned material sitting on a flat surface. Place your index finger (either one) in the center of the column under the first line of text. Move your finger down the column like a snake, in a smooth, continuous motion. The goal is to learn to see and read more than one line at a time.
Have a lot to read and feel like you’re never going to be able to get through it all? That’s what Day 7 of 10 Days to Faster Reading is all about. The chapter discusses causes and solutions to your ever-growing stack of material you have yet to read.
Several causes contribute to your reading pileup: procrastination, feeling the need to read and remember everything, and personal/professional development requirements. Procrastination is a tough one, and I’m going to give you a few suggestions from the book that may help. Reading and remembering everything is impractical, and I’ll give you hints as to why. And personal/professional development? That may be the most important material you can read.
Helping to solve procrastination involves cutting out the unimportant. What is your purpose for reading specific pieces of material? If you can’t define a valid purpose, if the material isn’t of much importance to you, then you simply don’t need to read it. Unsubscribe to all publications (both regular and electronic mail) that you don’t have a good reason to read (see: inbox zero). Toss any unnecessary reading clutter.
Another technique for limiting the amount of material you have to read, and thus helping your procrastination toward reading, is to pre-view everything you read. Pre-viewing will not only give you the big picture of the material, but it will also allow you to decide if it’s worth spending more time in a detailed read. If it’s not, toss it aside and move on to something else.
The main point here is to read selectively. Think a bit before you dive into material. Do you really need to read it? Is it going to benefit your life in any way? If you can’t answer yes, don’t read.
When choosing to read selectively, you might feel an increased urge to remember everything you read. After all, if you’re being more choosy about what you put into your mind, you might as well remember it all. But, this simply isn’t practical. You don’t need to remember everything and you shouldn’t waste your time trying. Remember only what you must remember — you must have a purpose for doing so.
There is an interesting exercise in this book that I’ve completed previously — one in which I highly recommend. If you don’t know where your time is going throughout the week, keep a detailed log of your activities. 7 days. 24 hours. 15 minute increments. Analyze the log at the end of the week and find more time to be productive and to read the most important reading material of all: personal and professional development.
The tool of the day is referred to as the “open hand wiggle.” With the material flat on a reading surface, open either hand with your fingers extended outward, palm facing the page. Center your middle finger in the middle of the column and move your hand down the page in an S-shape.
I’m not really digging the open hand wiggle. I still prefer the two finger pull discussed in day 4 and the white card method discussed in day 1. Whatever pacer tool works best for you, the most important thing is that you use it! Using a pacer helps you stay focused while reading, thus increasing speed and comprehension.
“Hanging Out the Caution Flag” teaches a number of things: criticism, quick preparation, challenging the author/content/yourself, and how to read certain material (newspapers, op-ed pieces, jargon-filled content). Let’s start with criticism.
Criticism, a word often thought of in a negative connotation, actually means “to consider the merits and demerits of and judge accordingly.” You must not accept everything in a nonfiction book as fact. Earth might still be thought of as flat (hint: it’s ROUND) if we accepted everything said to be factual. You must consciously criticize what you read, considering merits and demerits, and judge accordingly.
Three aspects should be challenged: the author, content, and yourself. The act of challenging the three aspects can be done with questions to answer for each. If you want the specifics, you can find them in chapter six of 10 Days to Faster Reading.
Don’t be a lemming. Challenge everything. Be a conscious critic. If the author is attempting to sway you into a belief or stating something as a fact you don’t believe to be true, do your own research and prove them wrong. And if you prove yourself to be wrong, accept it and move on.
By this point in the book it’s becoming clear that reading faster (and understanding better) has much to do with multiple passes over the material. Abby Marks Beale has re-iterated the notion of previewing everything you read several times now, so it must be important. From personal experience, previewing is definitely important.
Previewing your reading allows for several things to happen. One, you become familiar with the material prior to reading it in detail. Two, this level of background knowledge aids in faster reading and deeper understanding. Three, it allows you to skip the reading altogether if it’s not important to you. Reading faster with a deeper understanding is the point of this book, so previewing everything you read is extremely important.
Not discussed much in the book so far, but I believe equally important is reviewing. After you preview, and read in detail, reviewing the material. This is exactly the same as previewing, only it can’t be called previewing after you’ve read in detail. If you really want the material to sink in, preview, read, and review (and take notes, and discuss, and so on).
The reading tool introduced in chapter six is referred to as the pen-push. With your reading material on a flat surface, place your pen vertically on the page, pen tip a few lines above the material you are about to read. As you read, push the pen down the page. You should be focusing on key words and phrases, and attempting to push the pen faster and faster down the page.
A terrific way to get through reading material faster is by not reading it. Seriously. Preview it. (Deliberately skim it.)
Previewing material accomplishes three important tasks that will enhance your learning abilities. One, it can help you decide whether or not the material is even worth your time to read in detail. Two, it gives you the chance to further establish a purpose which leads to deeper learning. And three, it gives you background knowledge for the detailed read, again making the material easier to learn. This whole process also serves as an introduction and review for the material.
Non-fiction writing follows an outline. Knowing the structure of non-fiction writing allows you to preview more effectively. Abby Marks-Beale’s detailed description of the outline of non-fiction writing serves as a great reference for previewing. With this information close by, you can learn how to preview practically any non-fiction writing efficiently and effectively.
The tool of the day is referred to as the “pull down center.” Using your index finger in the center of a page, pull your finger down the text while reading the line above. Make sure your finger is moved at a continuous pace. This works best on a flat surface with narrow-columned material.
Tips (”it is no secret that your ability to efficiently read and learn is easier when you are well rested, relaxed, and feeling well”):
sleep — adults, between eight and nine hours of sleep
exercise — make your brain more alert by oxygenating the blood
brain food — rich with protein, avoid breads, pretzels, and pasta
reduce stress — feeling overwhelmed? prioritize
Thoughts
I believe that’s it for this chapter. More than anything, it serves as a good reference for the outline of non-fiction writing. This is something that will help me while practicing pre-viewing other material I’m currently studying. As for the tools thus far, they aren’t anything groundbreaking. I’m surprised more people don’t use them naturally. Though, I do happen to like the index card method discussed in chapter one. The idea of blocking material you’ve already read as a way to prevent regression is very nice.
And I know it’s lame to post albums from the same group to represent a lengthy amount of time, so here are a few other great albums to make up for that just in case of Montreal isn’t for you:
