That was pretty disappointing. I was hoping for more substance. Seems rather than giving strategies on how to read books with ADHD the article devolved into telling people with ADHD to embrace that they never finish any books.
I'm also not sure what "one thing I am going to take action on" means when the current book I'm reading is a history of Australian-East Timorese foreign relations. In general it sounds like a tactic for reading self-help or spirituality books and not much else?
I also don’t see how that thought will help. I don’t have the attention to focus on a book, I’ll surely forget my thought about what I’m going to take action on.
Indeed, or at least lobby my government to cut the oil spying whistleblowers, including the author of the said book, a bit of slack... alas these things might be a bit out of place alongside the "get more exercise" and "change my morning routine" items on the One Thing List.
Agreed. It wasn't so much 'how to read books' as 'how to get something out of books (without actually reading most of them)'.
For people who want to actually get through books, I'd recommend this tool [1], which I created several years back. It has become fairly popular in the ADHD world and is recommended at top universities (Stanford/Yale/Dartmouth) to students with ADHD and dyslexia. It works with Kindle books as well as many websites.
The Chrome extension comes with a 2-week free pass and I'm happy to send a month-long pass to any HNers out there who can benefit from it.
Yeah, the most seamless way is when it's integrated into a browser itself. The new Insight Browser (YC W19) offers this functionality in a pretty slick way (and it's totally free). [1] We also have a JS widget that can be embedded into a website, like The Program has done for their transcripts. [2]
This looks like a neat idea! A couple of questions if you don't mind:
1. Does the pass apply to the Firefox version too?
2. When you say "It works with Kindle books..." what do you mean? On desktop only? (My) Kindle doesn't have colour.
> Your mind doesn’t work in a linear, methodical way.
When I’m not sure if interested, I read texts like a prefix stream in JPEG-decoding: look only at the first sentence in a paragraph. If it hooks me, I’ll read the next. Otherwise skip to next paragraph.
It is yet faster than reading every noun as in regular cursory reading.
When it comes to long, difficult slogs, I prefer audiobooks. Mostly consumed when exercising outside in nature.
Imagine reading Moby Dick, and the author goes into a long boring diatribe about 19th century cetology. If you're sitting at home reading a physical book, pushing through is a long, difficult process that requires continuous effortful willpower. But when you're running a 10km, at worst you just zone out util the chapter's done. It's not like you have anything else to do. Sure, it's not optimal in terms of reading retention, but it's better than giving up completely because you can't force yourself to turn the pages.
This seems like better advice. For fiction, or even some non-fiction texts like philosophical treatises, I find I can amble through an audiobook by putting it on while I fall asleep, and then back-tracking a little each night.
The advice in the article pertains specifically to non-fiction, didactic literature, and hints that most books of this nature really are full of fluff. For those there's a few take-aways that you could have gotten from a concise article, instead of getting stuck in someone's ramblings.
Moby Dick was one of the first "real" books I touched as child.
I got it from the school library over the summer vacations.
I have to admit that I too found the asides boring and only managed to get about halfway through until the end of the vacations. At the beginning of the new school year I had to return it but had the intent to borrow it again to finish it. I never did and this must be the longest open point on my personal to do list. I wonder if - after so much time has passed - I still would find the asides boring...
As somebody with ADHD, I can't consume audiobooks at all. My mind just starts to wander 10 seconds in and eventually I realize I haven't been listening for the past half-hour. It's the same with talks or lectures on YouTube, though I've found that putting them at 2x speed helps to keep my attention.
I really do need a book in text form, because it allows me full control over how quickly or in what order I consume it. I learned a long time ago that reading books linearly doesn't work for me, so reading as I do involves a thorough look at the table of contents, then a lot of skimming and jumping back and forth to find the most interesting/stimulating bits and assembling that into a coherent view of the book.
Yeah same here. I only tried audio books once or twice, it just didn't do it for me. I need the physical images of the words in front of me in order to keep them in my head. I've also found physical books to be much more forgiving of micro-distractions. When some sound from across the house distracts me, all I need to do to "pause" the reading is... stop reading. My eyes can wander around the page briefly and I don't lose anything. But with audio, I am finding myself manually needing to pause, rewind, etc.
I also listen to lectures and so on at higher speeds! People I know think I'm crazy when they walk in and hear someone yammering about some dev topic in a chipmunk's voice, but I just get so impatient with slower speech.
I consume a lot of audiobooks - but I can really only listen to them in certain contexts when I am doing something else that requires a certain level of concentration: driving, gardening, cooking, cleaning and most of all walking. If I try and listen to them without doing something else I just fall asleep and I can't listen to them when doing something that requires a lot of concentration either.
I now have a lot of unused Audible credits because of the recent lockdown here which is lifting on Friday!
That's how I am. I mowed for a job two years ago, and that was the perfect activity to listen to an audiobook for me. It keeps me physically busy, but requires no thought. I can autopilot all day while listening.
I always describe multitasking this way as needing two different stimuli. I need something to engage my brain, and something to engage my body. I went though a phase of learning a Rubik's Cube while watching movies. That helped me focus greatly while it lasted.
I try to slot everything I can into one of those two categories. Things that take little thought, and things that require little physical action. Then I can mix and match them.
I can only consume audiobooks if I'm doing something else. It seems I have to push my brain to the edge of activity it can absorb at once. Too little activity (just listening to an audiobook) and I get bored and distracted. Too much activity (listening while coding) and I don't do either well. Listening while doing mindless tasks like cleaning or exercising seem to be just the right amount of mental activity to keep me engaged well.
> the author goes into a long boring diatribe about 19th century cetology. If you're sitting at home reading a physical book //
Don't you just scan ahead and jump to the next bit? I have a problem with doing this with novels I like, if it's getting intense then I'll want to skip/scan-read to get to the next tranche of "action". I do the same with TV/films, if there's a filler scene, just skip to the next scene.
Not sure if this comment was meant in earnest or not, but to be quite honest, "accept that you will sometimes fail" and "redefine what success means" were actually two very important steps in my journey to accept what my limitations were. I didn't get diagnosed until 28, meaning I had had a fairly long life of not succeeding at things, but also not realizing that I flat out was unable to succeed at them. So having to readjust my self-image to include this idea of a disability was quite challenging.
If you don't accept that you are going to fail at certain things or at certain times, then your failures will feel like your fault -- if only you had tried harder, if only you had worked more. By accepting that you have real limitations and will sometimes fail, each new failure doesn't have such a strong sting anymore. Instead, you are able to recognize it isn't your fault; you can pass the blame to your disorder, so to speak. Then, redefining what success means for you allows you to celebrate victories again. Ten years ago I never would have considered things like "I haven't been late to a meeting in two weeks" as a success to be celebrated, but now I do, so I'm able to extract some sort of satisfaction out of life with this janky brain instead of a never-ending series of disappointments.
I can't agree more. Too many people with ADHD are unhappy because they compare to normal people. You can't. ADHD is like not having an arm or leg. You never will be able to do some things and with others you will need a lot of special training. And that's fine. The challenge is to find what is worth to fight for. And many things are not. Be mindful.
>Not sure if this comment was meant in earnest or not
Somewhat satirical with a hint of truth - the article purports to solve the problem of ADHD reading stacks. It did so in a long windy form going all over the place which is generally the opposite of it's own advice. My summary fixes that by applying the article's premise to itself.
I generally have strong agreement with the article. This is as someone that has a significant amount of partially read kindle titles on the go right now and who recently managed to get his browser open tab count down to single digits for the first time in years.
I find this blog post fairly unhelpful, insofar as not only are not all ADHD people alike, the “tips” here seemed thin at best.
I’m an avid reader and in spite of my ADHD, I manage to read hundreds of pages a week (if not a day), between books, stuff online, and periodicals.
My tips:
Embrace reading multiple things at once. I’m often in the middle of three or four different books at once. Some I’ll finish immediately and some I’ll let sit for ages.
When returning to a book or long magazine article or something you haven’t finished, don’t be afraid to go back a bit to refresh yourself. I sometimes take notes in my Kindle app to remind myself where I left off. I have an eidetic/photographic memory (yes, yes , I’m aware claims of both are disputed but I’ve been tested many times over the years and have a better than average memory and the ability to recall where things were on a page/details about what I read long after I read it — provided I found the subject matter interesting), so I can often recall where I was once I get my context again, but sometimes it’s helpful to have a note about the context attached to where I left off.
I tend to try to read fiction relatively quickly, either consuming it all at once or over a few successive days. When I’m reading fiction, I try to keep myself to one fiction book at a tile. Whereas with non-fiction, I can often juggle multiple books at once and even leave non-fiction books for months before I finish them.
Audiobooks are amazing. I can read significantly faster than an audiobook, but it requires a lot more concentration. I can’t listen to audiobooks while doing another focus-heavy task (like writing or coding), but I can play a game or build a keyboard or do something else with my hands while listening to an audiobook. That can really help me focus because half my brain is doing something else “mindless” and I can really get sucked into the book.
On that same note, Audm, a service that does professional voice readers for newspaper and magazine content (from sources like The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Atlantic), is probably my favorite subscription. I subscribe to many of the news sources Audm covers, but I find myself much more able to consume the content aurally. Back in beforetimes, Audm replaced podcasts on my daily commute to work.
I also find having a dedicated reading device like a Kindle or an Onyx Boox device really nice because it gives me one less way to get distracted by a notification on my phone.
I used to frequently send Instapaper articles to my Kindle and I don’t do that anymore, but I do read nearly every book I can on either my Kindle or my larger Onyx Boox Note Air (it’s good for technical papers or legal documents), because it helps me focus more.
Don’t feel compelled to finish. If something isn’t clicking, go to something else. You can come back to it or just say “fuck it.” Reading should be for pleasure, above all. Yes, there are sometimes things we need to read for our jobs, but this whole notion of adults trying to feel compelled to read on a schedule like in high school or college is stupid. Read for pleasure. If something isn’t pleasurable, stop.
This is actually similar to how I've been reading a lot of books over the past few years. As a practical realist, I realized that, when it comes to reading, if I have a clear objective in mind, as long as I feel I have accomplished that objective then I have no use to continue my involvement with the work. Much of my reading of literature has amounted to merely becoming somewhat familiar with the work such that I am able to understand what others are talking about when they refer to it, and can engage somewhat intelligently with them about that work. This does not require actually reading the entire work in many cases.
This for me is the true value of much literature as it applies to me personally. Of course, on a basic level this is perhaps not quite as rewarding as reading a book cover to cover and becoming intimately acquainted with all the characters, stories, facts, figures, and/or arguments inside. But in my approach to a life filled with an absolute abundance of ideas from so many brilliant minds - indeed, there are most likely more men and women of utter genius alive today than have existed in the whole of antecedent human history - I decided that it would be a shame not to become acquainted with as many perspectives and ideas as possible. Sure, I sacrifice the rewards that come with truly coming to understand some objects in depth, but my hope has been that in doing so I have assumed some breadth in the understanding of the world, its affairs, and a great many of its inhabitants' ideas.
Starting with a motivation can be great especially if it lights my butt on fire. This one sort of demotivated me by telling me exactly what it looks like when I fail.
Then it told me to continue doing that but write it down when I do, creating a reference of failing attempts at reading a book.
While reading the article, at about half of the page, I got distracted thinking about useful comments that may be lie here thus stopped reading the article to read comments
Ok I forced myself to go back to finish reading, I found the content interesting, BUT why not apply the concept to the article too ?
being directed to people that easily get distracted,
why not intrigue the reader in the first paragraph ( with actual content
( the ONE thing concept, (badly summarized : learn something useful and feel free to get distracted or go away)) not a description of a common behaviour )
..than go deeper explaining the concept instead of buring it deep in the page ?
I don't have ADHD but often find it hard to finish books too. I honestly think that there's a lot of books that are simply not worth reading. Reading a book is quite a commitment (may take up to a month for me). I often lose interest once I realize that whole book is a single idea that could be summed up in a blog post but stretched to fit 300 pages.
That's actually the basis of... I forget the name... There's a new-ish product doing the rounds on YouTube sponsorships. Basically, they distill every book into its core ideas, and present them as a 15-minute chunk.
I like the idea, not because I dislike reading, but because it's handy to have an "idea map" of a book. The ToC is ostensibly that, but it's hard to figure out what their points are from the titles alone.
Wish I could remember what the company was called, but whatever. Haven't used them myself, but it struck me as a neat concept.
I think you mean https://www.blinkist.com/. I used it for a year, it's great for those low-density books. But really I'd like to read books, only the ones that are really interesting and valuable. My problem is that I don't want to spend money on ones that I then find are not worth the time. Perhaps someone can recommend a good subscription service with decent selection? How does scribd selection compare to amazon?
Yes. There are a lot of books, say "business" books, that properly fleshed out with examples and context are longer than any magazine is going to publish. (Lots of the oft-quoted concepts like Crossing the Chasm fit into this category.) But they could easily fit in something like 20 to 75 pages. However, publishing economics--which still broadly apply--dictate something like a 250-300 page work.
With my last book, I expanded on a couple areas in a new edition and I feel better about the overall information density. But in the original, I definitely felt I was padding here and there to hit a page target.
Some of those "low density" books are actually about changing your emotional responses or embedding an idea though. Sure you can distill the entire book down to a couple of pages and get the core idea, but your lizard brain isn't going to actually absorb the idea and put it into practice in your life. A lot of the repetition in self-help books in particular is about reinforcing the idea in multiple different contexts and building a proper representation of different behaviour in the reader's mind.
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” -- Francis Bacon
Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book provides a decent framework for dealing with the variety of books out there. There are also tools like Polar[1] that provide an easy way to do incremental reading[2] which may help when attacking a book piece by relevant piece.
I find that it's a habit you can build. If you read for 20 minutes a day, and keep it up for a few weeks, that might be all you need to keep the habit going for the rest of the year.
For some personality types, it's easy to get intensely interested in reading something, but it can be hard to keep up that intensity.
I built a web app for making goal boards, and it's perfect for getting yourself to read a little bit every day https://javaboards.com
For the benefit of people like me, I'm quoting the part of the article that should have been at the top.
> 1. Create a Word or Google document to track your books if spreadsheets fill you with fear.
> 2. You don’t need to read the whole book. Write down your ONE thing from the part of the book you did read.
> 3. Review the document weekly, to keep the ideas fresh in your mind.
> 4. If you find that you stopped implementing your ONE thing, go back to the book and either continue reading where you had left off or reread the part that you already read.
I believe that those articles are unreadable for everyone. They are written for search engines.
I built a whole business around giving straightforward answers. I remove superfluous text, and I use formatting to make my content easier to skim. There's no clickbait, no cookie notice, no newsletter prompt, no author bio and no sidebar content. There's just you and the answer you came for, and it loads in under 500 milliseconds.
This is working so well that it makes me wonder why other websites go out of their way to hide their answers. When I have simple gardening questions ("how much sun does [plant] need?", I have to click 3-4 results and scroll a few pages to get the answer. Even with a finely tuned ad blocker, the experience is infuriating.
Are you just referring to your blog? I went through a dozen pages of your comment history thinking you had a website about giving straight forward answers to questions.
Don't forget that you also need to add filler so you can shove a couple of ads in the middle of the stream. Add a side-story about your uncle that is completely irrelevant so you have room for one ad more! Then paginate the thing so the ads on the sides + top and bottom can reload for more impressions. And we feel it's important to offer our readers a nice flow, so add some history events so the back-button doesn't work properly anymore. And don't forget the modal to subscribe to the newsletter!
I created a website that does the opposite of that, and it works so well that I wonder why they bother doing this. I click away from so many websites because of all the friction they cause.
Have to say, as someone with reasonably severe inattentive-type ADHD, the hard part of this wouldn't so much be reading the book, but maintaining those documents and reviewing them weekly. The amount of half-finished lists, organisers, documents, etc I have on every cloud, note-taking and todo-list platform available that I never look at again in attempts to organise things like this is too high to count.
I don't have an ADHD diagnosis but clearly have some of the typical symptoms.
My brain is constantly in an obsessive state, meaning that I get an obsession about something and my brain just focuses on that single topic for some variable amount of time (days, weeks, months) until I get a new obsession. I'm quite unable to think (or do) anything else during that time.
Last November I experienced something that I have not experienced before. My mind was at peace. I had no obsession for at least two weeks. It felt amazing, I was so content.
I started to read Wizard of Earthsea, which I finished few days later. Then I read Tombs of Atuan in a few days as well. I read The Farthest Shore about halfway before my brain rebooted into its usual obsessive state. This was the most I'd read in almost 10 years!
I wish I could experience that peace of mind once again.
* Borrow books from a library to put an artificial time limit on your reading
* Use a bullet journal or similar note taking system to keep a list of things you want to read, so that something on the list will grab your interest
* Use an e-ink device, not so much for the display, but because it'll be less likely to have other distractions and more likely to let you jump right back into where you were in a book quickly.
I've been diagnosed as having ADHD, but am able to lay in bed reading books all day long (sometimes I need to put the book down and walk around thinking about what I've read but often I can read straight through), so I wonder - is my diagnosis wrong or is this common. Obviously also able to program all day without rest as long as the task is interesting enough.
on edit: obviously I was able to spend all day reading books back when I was single.
hmm, probably not. I would have to take lots of breaks. probably end up reconsider whatever had taken me to that point in my life I needed to read something dull.
This article describes a problem or behavior that I don’t see with ADHD (note: I am raising an ADHD child). What I observe are these two problems:
1. Poor reading comprehension.
2. Disqualified completion. Disqualified completion means the inability to differentiate poor completion rates (actually completing the material) from a loss of interest resulting in poor completion thereby believing the material is completely read when either it was never read or is entirely lost from memory.
The behaviors are interesting to observe because the child with ADHD appears to read with ease even if there is nothing to show for it, as in no memory of the material. I have raised children with dyslexia who struggle to read anything but know exactly what they have read, an opposite behavior.
Notes and hints do not appear to be a solution for the ADHD related behaviors. What we are trying to work on is persistence such that an uninteresting focus becomes excruciatingly exhausting very quickly. We try to remove talking, excuses, bullshitting, and unrelated movements from the event of focus to practice increasing focus duration.
Eventually we want to get to a spot where the child can self identify when focus is lost so that they can stop the focused activity at hand, take a quick break, and then resume the activity. We aren’t there yet. The biggest challenge is eliminating excuses and justifications that prioritize the distractions over the activity of focus. In a person without ADHD these sorts of qualifiers would come across as deceit or lies, but for a person with ADHD these behaviors appear to be a self regulator for emotional continuity that occurs arrhythmic to the focus by which emotions are generated.
How much time have you spent reading aloud to your kid?
Does the kid have the same trouble following material heard read aloud that they have for material they are reading themselves?
* * *
Anecdotally the times in the past when I would forget material I was reading came from either being profoundly sleep deprived (e.g. pulling an all-nighter in college) or mentally highly engaged with some other idea/problem and therefore extremely distracted while trying to read.
More recently (I have a 4-year-old) I have been doing lots of reading of kids books, and have developed the new ability to read a familiar (or unfamiliar but simple) picture book aloud including funny voices for all of the characters etc. from start to finish, while working on an unrelated problem in my head, and end up with no memory of what I read in the picture book or what happened.
Reading picture books is apparently (sometimes) now separate enough from my conscious attention that the effect is almost like short-term memory loss.
I have been reading more aloud to the child at night for about 20-30 minutes before bed. Sometimes the material is well received other times the child has snuck a book or device into bed and has no idea what was read. I haven’t determined how well the information is retained yet.
On an unrelated note playing games with the child results in conditions that look like sleep deprivation. They cannot slow the game down with excess talking or bullshitting and after about 10 minutes become utterly exhausted forgetting the game rules and wanting to lay their head on the board. I do understand that some level of mental fatigue is common to children that age, but it appears intensely amplified in the child with ADHD especially compared to dyslexic children who seem to have a longer period of focus than normal.
One thing I learned tutoring fellow students in math while in high school / college was that trying to do hard unfamiliar things (or just something they didn’t choose to do) makes plenty of people who do not have ADHD feel overwhelmed/fearful/anxious/tired, especially when they are put on the spot. Some people have a “play dead” kind of response to stress, while others get angry and start fighting.
It’s not clear to what extent these board game / reading issues are related to ADHD per se. Plenty of people with ADHD are excellent at learning/playing board games and are fast fluent readers with careful attention to detail and excellent retention of what they read.
To be honest, inattention to details is one of typical symptoms of ADHD. So there are probably people with ADHD who do not have this problem, but I would say that most of the time they are probably misdiagnosed.
The article lacked substance but I am glad that we are talking about reading with ADHD here.
I don't feel guilty about not finishing books because most of the times if I force myself to finish a book that I don't find interesting enough, I don't remember the information in the book anyway.
Over time I have learned to trust my brain, and figured that it will remember the important parts I read. If the book bores me then probably there is nothing interesting in it for me.
Most of my life I read books without taking notes, and I would go through them thinking that I understand everything, but in the end I would miss deeper connections and wouldn't connect them to the information I already possess.
Now, I read non-fiction books with taking notes and taking notes makes me stop and think about what I am reading and enables me to make deeper connections with what I already know and improves retaining. Also shifting from reading to note taking and going back helps my ADD brain. I read a couple books at a time, and when I get bored of one, I shift to another one that interests me. I choose my books around one topic, and this topical similarity makes my ADHD a boon because this way I can make those books talk to each other and improve my understanding of the subject. I used to take all my notes longhand before, but now I type really fast and writing longhand feels antiquated now. I also love to be able to search my notes and use my notes as a second-brain.
I read both from kindle and paper-books. The change from kindle to paper also helps my brain. The variety increases my concentration.
When I am reading fiction, I try to visualize everything I read because if I stop visualizing, it turns into eye training, I think other things, or just read and don't remember anything. If I figure out I am eye training instead of reading, I stop reading the book and come back later.
I don't have the diagnosis but certainly recognize add elements in how I navigate the world. My conclusion was that there are actually quite a lot of books that just start out great and objectively become worse as the page count goes up (like The subtle art of not giving a F. You really start feeling "yeah, ok, I get it." There are also books that are the other way around (like Atlas shrugged) where you struggle through the first half and then almost read the second half in one go.
This is a great example. I liked this book, but it could have been a blog article, or hell, even a single sentence: Konmari can also apply to obligations.
Sadly, publishing world is guilty of turning popular blog post series into books because the bloggers have a platform to promote. Then the bloggers turn each paragraph in their famous blog post into chapters in their book. You can understand that kind of books by reading the first few paragraphs of each chapter. As an example, Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life comes to my mind. I think he turned a Quora answer to a book for that one.
I love books that make me think along, and take me a lot of time to finish. James N. Frey's How to write a damn good novel is my example for that kind of book.
I would love to hear the books you have studied thoroughly.
Studied is a big word but (on the fiction side) most things by Greg Egan keep me reading with ease. Also Harry Potter :). But also the Commonwealth Saga 1 and 2 by Peter F. Hamilton, the 3 books after that I never finished. Dune kept me going for 5 books until I stopped. On the non-fiction side, Richard Dawkins is a good writer.
I'm not sure I've ever found a non-textbook science/math/philosophy book where the last chapter or two wasn't entirely skippable. There seems to be the point where the authors start stretching past what they really know and into more speculative, almost like they are planning the next book. I don't blame them, but it's not what I'm in that book for always.
Yes! I have just discovered this recently myself as well: whenever I wander off I context switch to something else I want to do instead of reforcing focus: multiple books, work, anki, side projects. Good so far.
I don't use a particular system. I am using Evernote to take all my notes because I take notes on many machines and when I started note taking Evernote was the only one I found with multi-device support.
Rarely, when I come across an interesting sentence structure or a great way to express an idea I write the exact words that is in the books.
Usually, I paraphrase what I have read, and jot down why I find it worthwhile. If the idea leads to new ones I follow those as well. I used to skip these thoughts because I thought reading the book was more important, but now I am focused on getting the most out of a book and following my thoughts, and thinking about the information is part of it.
Before, the title of the notes used to be the book's title and I would organize my notes based on titles. But for a couple years I have been taking notes around subjects. Since I also read around subjects, my note taking and my reading support each other nicely. If you consider starting to take notes while you are reading, I'd suggest going with subject based organization. If a note can be part of more than one subject, I copy the note to the other notebooks.
This subject based note taking also helps with understanding my interests, because some subjects grow dramatically while others grow marginally.
It also works as an early alert system when you are slacking off on areas you have to know but skip because you find them boring. This early alert system is extremely important for people with ADHD. I don't know about you, but I tend to over-focus on areas that I find interesting and don't touch areas that I don't. Then I try to make the areas that are important more interesting.
Not OP, but I mostly highlight and occasionally sprinkle in some text pointers. My goal is for future me to be able to pick up the book and only have to review the highlights to understand the important points.
Occasionally I’ll also use an index card as a bookmark and write page numbers with 1-2 word summaries of big ideas.
I don't think things need to be this complicated. I have a few books that I haven't read, many that I have, and some that are on their way. If a fiction book hooks me, I'll probably read it cover-to-cover and move on. If it doesn't, it's probably just not that good, and can go away or be finished when I have nothing more interesting to do. If it's non-fiction and non-reference, I tend to just work my way through them slowly, and go to a coffee shop with only the book to get a chapter done at a time. This is the case with Zen Motorcycle; I like it, but not so much that it needs to be read right now, so I'm slowly getting through it. The God Delusion took me about a year, while The Greatest Show on Earth took me 2 weeks or so, and The Selfish Gene took a few months probably. I retain some of the ideas, and don't expect much more, but if I want to, I'd just take notes. With reference books that I hope to come away with something useful from, I don't even bother anymore unless I'm prepared to act on it with an implementation or something. I read Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja cover-to-cover, and retained a bit, but revisiting it I'd just do the code along with it. Likewise, I read a tiny book on the history of Greenland, and didn't take notes and didn't hope to get more than a high level amount of retained information, because it's not important to anything I do, and that would be an unreasonable expectation. If however I did want to retain the data on how much fish was traded between 1750 and 1850, I'd just write it down and write an essay on it.
I think what I've decided is that the value from books is an accumulation of some ideas from all the books you read, and you should just set your expectations accordingly. My bet is that people who listen to audiobooks while working on a treadmill desk are just fooling themselves into thinking they've lived a sufficiently productive life, when really you should really read on your own accord, and go to the gym; getting to the end of a book isn't remotely as important as getting the value you set out to get from the text.
TL:DR; "I finished x books this month" is worthless, determine the value a book has before or during your reading of it, and adjust accordingly.
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[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadFor people who want to actually get through books, I'd recommend this tool [1], which I created several years back. It has become fairly popular in the ADHD world and is recommended at top universities (Stanford/Yale/Dartmouth) to students with ADHD and dyslexia. It works with Kindle books as well as many websites.
The Chrome extension comes with a 2-week free pass and I'm happy to send a month-long pass to any HNers out there who can benefit from it.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...
1: https://www.insightbrowser.com
2: https://programaudioseries.com/0-the-program-comes-for-us-al...
When I’m not sure if interested, I read texts like a prefix stream in JPEG-decoding: look only at the first sentence in a paragraph. If it hooks me, I’ll read the next. Otherwise skip to next paragraph.
It is yet faster than reading every noun as in regular cursory reading.
Imagine reading Moby Dick, and the author goes into a long boring diatribe about 19th century cetology. If you're sitting at home reading a physical book, pushing through is a long, difficult process that requires continuous effortful willpower. But when you're running a 10km, at worst you just zone out util the chapter's done. It's not like you have anything else to do. Sure, it's not optimal in terms of reading retention, but it's better than giving up completely because you can't force yourself to turn the pages.
The advice in the article pertains specifically to non-fiction, didactic literature, and hints that most books of this nature really are full of fluff. For those there's a few take-aways that you could have gotten from a concise article, instead of getting stuck in someone's ramblings.
I really do need a book in text form, because it allows me full control over how quickly or in what order I consume it. I learned a long time ago that reading books linearly doesn't work for me, so reading as I do involves a thorough look at the table of contents, then a lot of skimming and jumping back and forth to find the most interesting/stimulating bits and assembling that into a coherent view of the book.
I also listen to lectures and so on at higher speeds! People I know think I'm crazy when they walk in and hear someone yammering about some dev topic in a chipmunk's voice, but I just get so impatient with slower speech.
I now have a lot of unused Audible credits because of the recent lockdown here which is lifting on Friday!
I always describe multitasking this way as needing two different stimuli. I need something to engage my brain, and something to engage my body. I went though a phase of learning a Rubik's Cube while watching movies. That helped me focus greatly while it lasted.
I try to slot everything I can into one of those two categories. Things that take little thought, and things that require little physical action. Then I can mix and match them.
Don't you just scan ahead and jump to the next bit? I have a problem with doing this with novels I like, if it's getting intense then I'll want to skip/scan-read to get to the next tranche of "action". I do the same with TV/films, if there's a filler scene, just skip to the next scene.
If you don't accept that you are going to fail at certain things or at certain times, then your failures will feel like your fault -- if only you had tried harder, if only you had worked more. By accepting that you have real limitations and will sometimes fail, each new failure doesn't have such a strong sting anymore. Instead, you are able to recognize it isn't your fault; you can pass the blame to your disorder, so to speak. Then, redefining what success means for you allows you to celebrate victories again. Ten years ago I never would have considered things like "I haven't been late to a meeting in two weeks" as a success to be celebrated, but now I do, so I'm able to extract some sort of satisfaction out of life with this janky brain instead of a never-ending series of disappointments.
Somewhat satirical with a hint of truth - the article purports to solve the problem of ADHD reading stacks. It did so in a long windy form going all over the place which is generally the opposite of it's own advice. My summary fixes that by applying the article's premise to itself.
I generally have strong agreement with the article. This is as someone that has a significant amount of partially read kindle titles on the go right now and who recently managed to get his browser open tab count down to single digits for the first time in years.
I’m an avid reader and in spite of my ADHD, I manage to read hundreds of pages a week (if not a day), between books, stuff online, and periodicals.
My tips:
Embrace reading multiple things at once. I’m often in the middle of three or four different books at once. Some I’ll finish immediately and some I’ll let sit for ages.
When returning to a book or long magazine article or something you haven’t finished, don’t be afraid to go back a bit to refresh yourself. I sometimes take notes in my Kindle app to remind myself where I left off. I have an eidetic/photographic memory (yes, yes , I’m aware claims of both are disputed but I’ve been tested many times over the years and have a better than average memory and the ability to recall where things were on a page/details about what I read long after I read it — provided I found the subject matter interesting), so I can often recall where I was once I get my context again, but sometimes it’s helpful to have a note about the context attached to where I left off.
I tend to try to read fiction relatively quickly, either consuming it all at once or over a few successive days. When I’m reading fiction, I try to keep myself to one fiction book at a tile. Whereas with non-fiction, I can often juggle multiple books at once and even leave non-fiction books for months before I finish them.
Audiobooks are amazing. I can read significantly faster than an audiobook, but it requires a lot more concentration. I can’t listen to audiobooks while doing another focus-heavy task (like writing or coding), but I can play a game or build a keyboard or do something else with my hands while listening to an audiobook. That can really help me focus because half my brain is doing something else “mindless” and I can really get sucked into the book.
On that same note, Audm, a service that does professional voice readers for newspaper and magazine content (from sources like The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Atlantic), is probably my favorite subscription. I subscribe to many of the news sources Audm covers, but I find myself much more able to consume the content aurally. Back in beforetimes, Audm replaced podcasts on my daily commute to work.
I also find having a dedicated reading device like a Kindle or an Onyx Boox device really nice because it gives me one less way to get distracted by a notification on my phone.
I used to frequently send Instapaper articles to my Kindle and I don’t do that anymore, but I do read nearly every book I can on either my Kindle or my larger Onyx Boox Note Air (it’s good for technical papers or legal documents), because it helps me focus more.
Don’t feel compelled to finish. If something isn’t clicking, go to something else. You can come back to it or just say “fuck it.” Reading should be for pleasure, above all. Yes, there are sometimes things we need to read for our jobs, but this whole notion of adults trying to feel compelled to read on a schedule like in high school or college is stupid. Read for pleasure. If something isn’t pleasurable, stop.
This for me is the true value of much literature as it applies to me personally. Of course, on a basic level this is perhaps not quite as rewarding as reading a book cover to cover and becoming intimately acquainted with all the characters, stories, facts, figures, and/or arguments inside. But in my approach to a life filled with an absolute abundance of ideas from so many brilliant minds - indeed, there are most likely more men and women of utter genius alive today than have existed in the whole of antecedent human history - I decided that it would be a shame not to become acquainted with as many perspectives and ideas as possible. Sure, I sacrifice the rewards that come with truly coming to understand some objects in depth, but my hope has been that in doing so I have assumed some breadth in the understanding of the world, its affairs, and a great many of its inhabitants' ideas.
Then it told me to continue doing that but write it down when I do, creating a reference of failing attempts at reading a book.
What a strange piece of advice.
why not intrigue the reader in the first paragraph ( with actual content ( the ONE thing concept, (badly summarized : learn something useful and feel free to get distracted or go away)) not a description of a common behaviour )
..than go deeper explaining the concept instead of buring it deep in the page ?
I like the idea, not because I dislike reading, but because it's handy to have an "idea map" of a book. The ToC is ostensibly that, but it's hard to figure out what their points are from the titles alone.
Wish I could remember what the company was called, but whatever. Haven't used them myself, but it struck me as a neat concept.
With my last book, I expanded on a couple areas in a new edition and I feel better about the overall information density. But in the original, I definitely felt I was padding here and there to hit a page target.
Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book provides a decent framework for dealing with the variety of books out there. There are also tools like Polar[1] that provide an easy way to do incremental reading[2] which may help when attacking a book piece by relevant piece.
[1] https://getpolarized.io/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading
For some personality types, it's easy to get intensely interested in reading something, but it can be hard to keep up that intensity.
I built a web app for making goal boards, and it's perfect for getting yourself to read a little bit every day https://javaboards.com
> 1. Create a Word or Google document to track your books if spreadsheets fill you with fear.
> 2. You don’t need to read the whole book. Write down your ONE thing from the part of the book you did read.
> 3. Review the document weekly, to keep the ideas fresh in your mind.
> 4. If you find that you stopped implementing your ONE thing, go back to the book and either continue reading where you had left off or reread the part that you already read.
I'll go read the entire article some other time.
I built a whole business around giving straightforward answers. I remove superfluous text, and I use formatting to make my content easier to skim. There's no clickbait, no cookie notice, no newsletter prompt, no author bio and no sidebar content. There's just you and the answer you came for, and it loads in under 500 milliseconds.
This is working so well that it makes me wonder why other websites go out of their way to hide their answers. When I have simple gardening questions ("how much sun does [plant] need?", I have to click 3-4 results and scroll a few pages to get the answer. Even with a finely tuned ad blocker, the experience is infuriating.
oh, btw: haven't you forgotten to mention the Outbrain Ads that look like articles in the bottom of the page?
My brain is constantly in an obsessive state, meaning that I get an obsession about something and my brain just focuses on that single topic for some variable amount of time (days, weeks, months) until I get a new obsession. I'm quite unable to think (or do) anything else during that time.
Last November I experienced something that I have not experienced before. My mind was at peace. I had no obsession for at least two weeks. It felt amazing, I was so content.
I started to read Wizard of Earthsea, which I finished few days later. Then I read Tombs of Atuan in a few days as well. I read The Farthest Shore about halfway before my brain rebooted into its usual obsessive state. This was the most I'd read in almost 10 years!
I wish I could experience that peace of mind once again.
* Borrow books from a library to put an artificial time limit on your reading
* Use a bullet journal or similar note taking system to keep a list of things you want to read, so that something on the list will grab your interest
* Use an e-ink device, not so much for the display, but because it'll be less likely to have other distractions and more likely to let you jump right back into where you were in a book quickly.
on edit: obviously I was able to spend all day reading books back when I was single.
Can you read a book that's necessary, but dull?
Your comment about "as long as the task is interesting enough" is why I ask.
I found the medication made a big difference for me in doing the boring, but needful.
hmm, probably not. I would have to take lots of breaks. probably end up reconsider whatever had taken me to that point in my life I needed to read something dull.
1. Poor reading comprehension.
2. Disqualified completion. Disqualified completion means the inability to differentiate poor completion rates (actually completing the material) from a loss of interest resulting in poor completion thereby believing the material is completely read when either it was never read or is entirely lost from memory.
The behaviors are interesting to observe because the child with ADHD appears to read with ease even if there is nothing to show for it, as in no memory of the material. I have raised children with dyslexia who struggle to read anything but know exactly what they have read, an opposite behavior.
Notes and hints do not appear to be a solution for the ADHD related behaviors. What we are trying to work on is persistence such that an uninteresting focus becomes excruciatingly exhausting very quickly. We try to remove talking, excuses, bullshitting, and unrelated movements from the event of focus to practice increasing focus duration.
Eventually we want to get to a spot where the child can self identify when focus is lost so that they can stop the focused activity at hand, take a quick break, and then resume the activity. We aren’t there yet. The biggest challenge is eliminating excuses and justifications that prioritize the distractions over the activity of focus. In a person without ADHD these sorts of qualifiers would come across as deceit or lies, but for a person with ADHD these behaviors appear to be a self regulator for emotional continuity that occurs arrhythmic to the focus by which emotions are generated.
Does the kid have the same trouble following material heard read aloud that they have for material they are reading themselves?
* * *
Anecdotally the times in the past when I would forget material I was reading came from either being profoundly sleep deprived (e.g. pulling an all-nighter in college) or mentally highly engaged with some other idea/problem and therefore extremely distracted while trying to read.
More recently (I have a 4-year-old) I have been doing lots of reading of kids books, and have developed the new ability to read a familiar (or unfamiliar but simple) picture book aloud including funny voices for all of the characters etc. from start to finish, while working on an unrelated problem in my head, and end up with no memory of what I read in the picture book or what happened.
Reading picture books is apparently (sometimes) now separate enough from my conscious attention that the effect is almost like short-term memory loss.
On an unrelated note playing games with the child results in conditions that look like sleep deprivation. They cannot slow the game down with excess talking or bullshitting and after about 10 minutes become utterly exhausted forgetting the game rules and wanting to lay their head on the board. I do understand that some level of mental fatigue is common to children that age, but it appears intensely amplified in the child with ADHD especially compared to dyslexic children who seem to have a longer period of focus than normal.
It’s not clear to what extent these board game / reading issues are related to ADHD per se. Plenty of people with ADHD are excellent at learning/playing board games and are fast fluent readers with careful attention to detail and excellent retention of what they read.
I don't feel guilty about not finishing books because most of the times if I force myself to finish a book that I don't find interesting enough, I don't remember the information in the book anyway.
Over time I have learned to trust my brain, and figured that it will remember the important parts I read. If the book bores me then probably there is nothing interesting in it for me.
Most of my life I read books without taking notes, and I would go through them thinking that I understand everything, but in the end I would miss deeper connections and wouldn't connect them to the information I already possess.
Now, I read non-fiction books with taking notes and taking notes makes me stop and think about what I am reading and enables me to make deeper connections with what I already know and improves retaining. Also shifting from reading to note taking and going back helps my ADD brain. I read a couple books at a time, and when I get bored of one, I shift to another one that interests me. I choose my books around one topic, and this topical similarity makes my ADHD a boon because this way I can make those books talk to each other and improve my understanding of the subject. I used to take all my notes longhand before, but now I type really fast and writing longhand feels antiquated now. I also love to be able to search my notes and use my notes as a second-brain.
I read both from kindle and paper-books. The change from kindle to paper also helps my brain. The variety increases my concentration.
When I am reading fiction, I try to visualize everything I read because if I stop visualizing, it turns into eye training, I think other things, or just read and don't remember anything. If I figure out I am eye training instead of reading, I stop reading the book and come back later.
I hope this helps.
This is a great example. I liked this book, but it could have been a blog article, or hell, even a single sentence: Konmari can also apply to obligations.
I love books that make me think along, and take me a lot of time to finish. James N. Frey's How to write a damn good novel is my example for that kind of book.
I would love to hear the books you have studied thoroughly.
Rarely, when I come across an interesting sentence structure or a great way to express an idea I write the exact words that is in the books.
Usually, I paraphrase what I have read, and jot down why I find it worthwhile. If the idea leads to new ones I follow those as well. I used to skip these thoughts because I thought reading the book was more important, but now I am focused on getting the most out of a book and following my thoughts, and thinking about the information is part of it.
Before, the title of the notes used to be the book's title and I would organize my notes based on titles. But for a couple years I have been taking notes around subjects. Since I also read around subjects, my note taking and my reading support each other nicely. If you consider starting to take notes while you are reading, I'd suggest going with subject based organization. If a note can be part of more than one subject, I copy the note to the other notebooks.
This subject based note taking also helps with understanding my interests, because some subjects grow dramatically while others grow marginally.
It also works as an early alert system when you are slacking off on areas you have to know but skip because you find them boring. This early alert system is extremely important for people with ADHD. I don't know about you, but I tend to over-focus on areas that I find interesting and don't touch areas that I don't. Then I try to make the areas that are important more interesting.
Occasionally I’ll also use an index card as a bookmark and write page numbers with 1-2 word summaries of big ideas.
Step 2: download original source books on LibGen. E.g., complete works of Kant.
Step 3: keyword search to find relevant passages.
I read so many books now. Let's go ride bikes!
I think what I've decided is that the value from books is an accumulation of some ideas from all the books you read, and you should just set your expectations accordingly. My bet is that people who listen to audiobooks while working on a treadmill desk are just fooling themselves into thinking they've lived a sufficiently productive life, when really you should really read on your own accord, and go to the gym; getting to the end of a book isn't remotely as important as getting the value you set out to get from the text.
TL:DR; "I finished x books this month" is worthless, determine the value a book has before or during your reading of it, and adjust accordingly.