Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
I was a good reader throughout my childhood, youth and academic years. Lately, and after a couple of decades, it's becoming increasingly challenging to focus, consume and finish books. I'm becoming the modern age illiterate. I'm usually squeezed for time - but even if I find some, I don't pick up where I left.
Does anyone encountering the same challenge? Any ideas/tips that could help overcome the cycle? Do you think it's caused by modern information overload, distraction addiction, or perhaps dealing with short cryptographic lines of code?
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] threadI've enjoyed this article that was recently on HN http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/addicted-to...
2) Try to use small moments of free time. As an example, if I have more than 30 minutes of free time, I read some pages of a book.
If you stop to think about it, you are probably going to remember recurring moments in which you had 30~ minutes of free time. Instead of using it to read Hacker News or browse Facebook, read something. Commuting is a great example.
God only knows how bad this is going to be for kids that are now growing up with youtube.
Not that these kinds of forums correct it: people will still link long arguments that they are unable or unwilling to summarize in their own words.
Writing a shorter post, especially one that summarizes what you'll get out of an article, typically takes more mental work since you have to pack more insight into fewer words.
Writing an investigative article, of course, takes more time and thought but it's not because you're putting more words out; if anything, padding it with flowery novel-style antidotes (that took little research) is how they make them artificially long, and it annoys me greatly.
If what you have to say legitimately requires 5000 words, go for it! Otherwise, your long post is not improving the exchange of ideas.
[1] https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
If 50 would do. That's rarely the case.
Most of the time short articles aren't the result of distilling hundreds of hours of wisdom down to an easily digestible few hundred words.
Instead they are the result of dropping all consideration of context and pushing a simplistic view. Or rushing junk out the door.
An article goes from:
"Given our specific set of circumstances (industry, team size, project size, project makeup, technology stack, turnover, strategic direction, short term goals etc) X is great. We considered alternatives Y and Z but discarded them because of A, B, and C. We ran into issues D and E and were able to do F and G to work around them. We later found we had missed risk H in our analysis but we were lucky enough that it didn't come up.
To:
"X is great. We used it to increase our productivity by 10%."
[long anecdote about someone using not-X that mixes in numerous other factors and is vague on what caused what]
[long description about meeting with a subject of the story that painstakingly details their hair, their clothing style, their mannerisms, and the general appearance of the venues]
[much more confusing presentation of the paragraph you just gave]
Also, when people link the article or recommends it, they will tend to give either no summary, or a clickbait(ier) version of your second example, like, "The miracle of X".
I've found that crippling my tech is a nice workaround. Some examples:
Sticking to dead tree or kindle-like devices instead of PDF on a computer / tablet makes me concentrate, finish and think about the book I'm reading.
Playing in some dumbed down console allows me to enjoy a videogame and relax without distractions. I rarely play PC games to the end.
I reach my productivity peak with an OpenBSD netbook without internet connection and some spartan window manager like cwm or wmii. I'm also reading man files regularly now instead of compulsively asking my search engine of choice.
I still hate sitting still for 90 minutes in order to watch a movie though.
I've concentrated more on slimming down my book shelves by getting to all of those books that I always wanted to. I'm finding them more illuminating and enjoyable than any short article. I find them more likely to change my viewpoint than any catchy article could because someone dedicated months, if not years, to put their work out there.
As far as finding time, unless you're busy from when you wake up into when your head is back on the pillow you can find time for what you feel is important enough. For me I've cut scrolling through articles and social media for something more substantial.
For finding time to read, I go through lulls when I try to read before I go to bed since I almost never can finish a chapter before falling asleep. Instead, I started carving out time in the afternoons on weekends when I often have a couple open hours.
I have a hard time finishing articles and, even, comments.
It's a very bad situation.
What I find myself doing now with most long-form Web or mobile content, as well as printed magazines and newspapers, is skimming to get the basic facts or quotes and then moving on. I just don't have the time or attention to stay focused anymore.
As for books (fiction and nonfiction), I find myself skimming when I using the Kindle. The Kindle Fire is even worse because of the easy access to other distractions. For printed books I can focus but I have found my threshold for abandoning a book is much lower. I did this recently with a novel by an author I used to love; I just felt the characters in the new novel were wooden and I noticed some basic editing errors. I returned the book to the library after about 40 or 50 pages.
As for the reasons behind this: I am not a programmer so for me the issue is not related to dealing with short lines of code. I think it is a combination of information overload, easy access to screens, and training our minds (through exposure to text messages, tweets, online updates, short video clips, etc.) to prefer condensed communication.
The trend makes me uncomfortable, but on the other hand, I also see it as part of the evolution of media and society. If we look back through history, we can see how other new media had a similar impact. Newspapers, film, and television changed styles of writing and peoples' preferences for reading materials and storytelling. Then, as now, there was great discomfort in the way media and storytelling evolved. A 1961 speech by the then-chairman of the FCC called television a "vast wasteland." If you go further back, there was negative reaction to the introduction of radio, the use of photos in newspapers, and even opera, which was seen by 17th-century British intellectuals as "chromatic torture." There has been a lot of thoughtful expository writing about this; if you are interested (and can manage to read an entire book) I recommend checking out Mitchell Stephens "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word" (1) and Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (2). They are somewhat dated now, but I think they really documented important transitions from antiquity to the end of the 20th century.
1. https://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/rise%20of%20the%20image...
2. http://www.amazon.com/Orality-Literacy-Anniversary-Edition-A...
I think your comment about "squeezed for time" probably explains it. You're probably slightly stressed or burned out through working too long hours. All the evidence suggests that working too many hours is detrimental to productivity, and your inability to focus seems to be proof that your productivity is suffering.
Try relaxing more and reducing your working hours.
I started reading again when it became a lot more convenient, thanks to the kindle.
I think I finished reading all the Wheel of Time books because of the convenience of the kindle (it gets boring around book eight, before a well deserved end).
Paper books are heavy and expensive.
It doesn't work for all books, as it is not a good PDF reader, but for anything that's more text than graphics or layout, it's a huge improvement.
If you get the font size right, it's not bad. The advantage of the phone is that it's always in my pocket, so if I've got a couple of minutes of waiting time, I can just pull out my phone from my pocket.
I think kindle is a much better way to address the issue.
But I agree with you, just because endorsing a particular brand was not intended, I only wanted to suggest the particular technology of e-Ink readers instead of paper books.
Like OP, I was an avid reader during my school years and noticed that I wasn't doing it as much the past couple of years. I realized most of the time that I could spend reading books I was spending reading articles from my RSS feeds, but many times just to get a sense of completion (like an Inbox Zero for my RSS feeds), which meant I didn't really let them sink in or wasn't doing any thinking of my own about them.
Realizing that it provided very little value, if any, I decided that I had to stop that and go back to reading only when I have the time to do so at my own pace, and only things that I really wanted to read, not that I felt I had to read for bogus reasons.
Going back to OP's question, I do think that information overload is partly to blame here. At least for me, it's taking a conscious effort to put this in practice and ignore a lot of the information that comes my way.
You might look into taking a few supplements or improving the quality of your diet. We tend to become deficient in certain things as we get older and this can reduce our ability to focus. Reversing the deficiencies I suffered has helped me get my brain back, at least somewhat. It's not like I can calculate math problems faster than you can type them into a calculator these days like I once could, but I do function better than I did when I was really ill.
Walk more, eat better, consider switching to a kindle reader. Perhaps it is health related, as it largely was for me.
Best of luck.
If you want to read, read paper books or read on kindle. Don't read on your phone.
It works the same for me with sleeping. Whenever I start being uncomfortable on my bed, I switch to sofa for a while.
I would suggest reading some books from 'A Very Short Introduction' series. Each topic is written by an expert in that field; and is about 130-150 pages. I have read books on Marx, Foucault, The History of Life. Next up is Metaphysics; followed by Logic, Planets and Fractals. I am enjoying reading these in a cafe!
You're probably used to extracting information you want in a very short period of time via sites like StackOverflow or Wikipedia or whatever. If you're like me, when you encounter something that isn't going to give you the gold quickly, you probably move on to something that will.
You're used to the quick turnaround, so when something takes longer it makes you feel like you're squeezed for time.
For example, I have plenty of physical programming books. A lot of the time I know that the answer I seek is in one of those books. Sometimes I even know which book and the location in that book. But guess what? I still go to StackOverflow first because it's quicker and someone will have already summarized the book. I'm so used to getting information quickly, that actually having to look for it is unthinkable. It _feels_ like I don't have enough time to read the book myself, but that's really not true at all.
I do think this is problematic, and not all good. A great deal of knowledge still requires significant length of text to convey -- sure, the retrieval cost for any individual limited concept on the internet is much lower, but you're not going to develop a rich understanding of, as a hyperbolic example, the history of China, from one article or from Wikipedia.
In a nutshell, he argues that our brain gets better at things that we do a lot, and worse at things we used to do a lot but now do a lot less. Reading is not different from any other activity in that sense.
And many people nowadays don't read many long, hard books anymore, and instead quickly skim short articles and then switch to the next.
So we get better at quickly getting bits of information from short articles, and worse at staying focused for an hour on the same demanding text.
I find it hard to argue with.
Jokes apart ; attention span going down is certainly a concern but do you think we all are getting way more lazier? Shortcuts, one line stack overflow answers, instant results and 2 min quick fix tutorials are not just killing attention spans but also making us lazy and bad developers.