How many books do you read in parallel?
I thought I was going to be able to read 3 books in tandem but my circumstances taught me the lesson that I will not be able to do that.
This month I wanted to read Meditations, Effective Notetaking and The Stand by Stephen King.
I usually read novels before I go to sleep, it’s the habit I use to replace the use of my phone before bed. To try to improve my english I usually read while following the audiobook (I don’t even know if it’s useful though, but I like it). Novels and other kind of fiction content is the only one I hear with an audiobook.
I read nonfiction mainly two times a day, at breakfast and when I eat my lunch with a 30 min timer to remind me when my reading session is over. I carry my pencil with me everywhere so that I can also read if I find myself waiting for someone, in a line or at another situation where most of the people just scroll social media. Reading is kind of my default habit now.
When I get home from work I sometimes just want to rest before exercising, maybe I take a 15-20 min nap with my Chihuahua. If it’s a day where I don’t have to exercise with calisthenics (I get bored at the gym and bodybuilding, so I do this instead) I take my dog for a 40 min walk listening to Cal Newport’s podcast or maybe a philosophy one.
Then by evening or maybe a little earlier I do my daily meditation and wait for my girlfriend to get home. I think I might be able to squeeze another 30 min - 1 hour of reading non fiction here, but my mind can be really stubborn by this time forcing me to watch Netflix or something.
Then my day it’s over. Most of the time I can’t read at dinner because I eat with my girlfriend and it’s kind of the time to speak about the day and listen to her.
Considering my schedule I will have to remove from my “now reading” list the book of effective note taking simply because I can’t seem to find more hours to read. At work I mostly do deep work reading stuff related to my area and trying to solve problems, so my schedule is full there.
I’ve been thinking to wake up earlier to squeeze another hour of silent reading in the morning but still, I think 3 books is overkill for me.
What do you friends think?
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
Sounds like you want to force yourself to read more?
Forcing in more reading time can also backfire: if there's no purpose, you just make your days worse for no reason. Your original post doesn't say, so to err on the side of caution:
Do you have an objective in mind? Will these books further a goal you're really into? What's the value of reading these particular books?
Fiction
You can read some books for leisure. It doesn't matter how long that takes, does it? So "The Stand" wouldn't hurt to keep, I believe. I also don't see a point in getting more efficient in having fun with novels like that
(A work of fiction can also become a subject to study. If you're a Stephen King historian writing a dissertation about his work, that would change things.)
Optimizing the rest
So for non-fiction, if there's a purpose to your reading, maybe you can read more efficiently. Not page-by-page, word-for-word, but more skimming and surveying the book to get to the good stuff. That's often useful with textbooks and academic writing, but the typical US non-fiction book is so shallow that you'll spend a long time paging through it to skip anecdotes
About Netflix
Listened to a Seth Godin podcast the other day. Skip to the 20min mark, where the questions roll in:
https://shows.acast.com/akimbo/episodes/enrollment-and-possibility-e
He points out that he doesn't have a TV problem because he doesn't have a TV. So he is sometimes just bored by default, but at least not filled up with trash ads. So not Netflixifying in principle could be a thing to try together for a month -- just outright blocking the site with a browser extension, for example.
So if you want to read more, being bored and tired, and not stimulated by video for a while, could help. Being rested and with a less cluttered mind today could result in more focused reading tomorrow.
Maybe @Sascha has more interesting things to say about this.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
1 or 2.
I think the number of books to read parallelly invites a fallacy: That you can somehow increase your input. But the bottleneck is the time dedicated anyhow. It is not the case that you have a surplus of time, but read so long on one book at a time that you need to switch books to avoid mental fatigue. Therefore, I think, it is better overall to just focus on one book unless you are truly in a surplus of time.
I am a Zettler
These are thinly veiled humblebrags about my reading habits. I'm trying to be humble and share my perspective. Yours will be different, and thanks for sharing. I love picking up tips from hearing how others here approach reading.
I generally like to have three books cooking, like a three-course dinner at a literary party. I aim for a more balanced diet that feeds the soul as much as it impresses the intellect. One is audio, one is electronic, and one is physical. I put little to no pressure on completing each.
We are among friends. We are quirky readers with quirkier reading habits. My local indie bookstore has a reader board out front that currently reads, "Don't trust anyone who hasn't brought a book." I want to be prepared to read at all times.
@Jvet, time blocking, as you suggest, is a way to squeeze more reading time into the day. At both ends of the spectrum of time spent reading, the opportunity costs of reading cause the rest of life to falter.
For me, fiction is best in the ear. I like the authors or movie actors to read to me. I haven't found a great way to keep notes when listening to a book. I don't want to turn a leisure activity into a logistical nightmare. I do my audiobook reading on walks with the puppy.
I'm currently in a literary fiction class that gives some purpose to my reading of fiction. I feel lucky to get the opportunity to read a book a week for 15 weeks, all predetermined.
I envy @Sascha's one-pointed focus on reading a single book at a time.
Will Simpson
I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Definitely, I've been trying to make myself read more because I saw there was a bunch of empty time where I just watched YouTube videos or scrolled social media. However, I think I'm reaching a good middle ground.
Definitely. I got the "Life Buckets" idea from Cal Newport and I read to improve my life, philosophy particularly to help me be happier and understand the world and other non-fiction to improve a certain skill (in this case note-takin/learning). The only time I read just to read is when I'm with a novel which is mostly for pleasure. I have to say although that autism gave me a curious mind that strives to learn about "niche" topics just because I find them interesting, my Amazon cart therefore is starting to fill with nordic history.
Good advice, thank you!
That's one of the main reasons I want to learn another language, I feel I'm losing knowledge that isn't being translated. I really don't know why they add so many anecdotes lol.
I'll listen it, thanks!
Mmm, I never thought about the influence of a previous state of mind for the following day, thanks for suggesting this.
@Sascha said:
Good advice, thank you.
It seems to me our reading habit is kind of similar. I read non fiction first thing in the morning and then again before evening (if I manage to, if not then a little bit later) because my mind is ready for the task. Maybe it has something to do with cortisol, but I'm definitely more "clever" or "intelligent" at the morning than at night. That's why I leave fiction novels when I go to bed.
Thanks for your input, I'll stick to one non-fiction book and one fiction before bed. One book will help with a deeper engagement with the material I think, instead of bouncing from one topic to another.
@Will said:
Great advice! It's a coincidence I always have one with me
That's the main reason I don't listen to non-fiction, I can't use my pencil to write in the margins and engage deeply with the material. When I'm walking listening to a podcast I try to hold good ideas inside my brain until I get to my BuJo and just write everything, which will later make it to the Zettelkasten.
Ha! There is little to be envious about. I focus because of necessity. I truly miss the times, when I had the time to just spend a morning or an afternoon in the library, having dozens of books on the desk.
In a perfect world, I'd combine both approaches:
This is the downside of my efficiency approach: Right now, by just reading before sleeping, I can read 2 non-fiction books per week. But this is a very utilitarian way of reading. I read to prepare the books to be processed, but I neither enjoy nor loath the reading. I approach my reading with a blue-collar mindset: I try to find calm within the confines of the task that I have to do anyway.
So, I don't truly envy anything. But I am happy for you for your freedom.
I don't think that the correct solution is the middle ground. Watching YT or scrolling Social Media doesn't serve any good purpose.
Oh, dang. I didn't see @ctietze awesome post!
I want to double down on this: If you don't have an overarching goal structure, each action/habit that elicit a potential benefit becomes tempting. Or in other words: It is easy to do some right things, but it is difficult to do the right thing.
My whole approach to the Zettelkasten Method, for example, is all about gaining the most efficiency out of your system, while creating the highest ability to deal with complexity.
This is backwards compatible with situations in which you don't need maximum efficiency. Then you can consciously decide for a less efficient way, if it brings more joy to your life, for example.
So, if you love spending time with your Zettelkasten for leisure, strictly adhering to everything what comes out of my mouth, would be a case of over-optimising. (Unless of course, you love optimising for leisure.
This is a perfect example of the above. In leisure, there is no need for haste, because you are after a certain state of mind for a duration of time. (Similar to taking a walk).
This is exactly how I attack the issue. In modern times, we outsourced the mental state of being engaged. Most of the day of a modern person is spent in a very reactive mode. On top of that, the empty spaces are filled with stuff that doesn't have any negative feedback loop like music, podcasts, videocasts etc. You get basically force-feed information. Reading on the other hand has a negative feedback loop. You have to be active to get the input. Then you get tired, and your motivation doesn't meet the threshold and you stop.
The more opportunities you create to attain information with no active partaking, the higher the threshold becomes: Reading becomes hard, writing becomes hard etc. The more variety of low effort/high yielding activities you incorporate in your life, the higher the motivation threshold gets, and the lower your motivation itself becomes. The latter is often labelled as dopamine depletion or something like that. The former goes a bit deeper: It starts to seep into your outlook on life. The symptoms are not that tightly connected to the pathological input, so you can't understand it straight forward.
But if you look into the scientific literature, you'll discover quickly that each low effort/high yielding activity (fast food, social media, pornography, online dating, etc.) is connected to psychological disorders (e.g. anxiety) and ethical disorders (e.g. psychopathy)1. This manifests in changes in the belief system and how you deal with other people's belief systems (e.g. many non-religious people cannot even understand what it means to be religious. This lack of empathy results in misjudgement and a failure even on the level of scientific endeavours to understand religious phenomena.).
But you just don't add negative aspects, you remove positive aspects. Hope and optimism are diminished, because your brain calculates the probability of your attaining a certain goal. If you messed up your motivation system, your brain knows that it is not realistic for you to strive for goals that entail a long delay in reward. So, the proportion of possibilities in life is vastly diminished. You start to live a life in which you don't feel that you determine the outcome of your life. Because there is no immediate reason for hope and optimism and you developed a short time-horizon (time units shorten with higher negative emotions), you cut yourself off from the idea of indirect hope: "I am not the person how can attain the goal, but I can become the person that has a chance to strive for it."
OK, I went a little bit rogue, because this touches my main work.
A summarisation of my position is to eliminate rubbish as much as possible and refrain from thinking rubbish is sometimes OK. It is never OK. You just shouldn't beat yourself over being human and susceptible to rubbish.
(this is partly based on my work on modernity as sickness, which is not published yet)
There is no scientifically justified statement of something being a disorder. Science excludes normative judgements. The statement that something is a disorder, necessitates to stipulate a normative order. This is why I distinguish between psychological disorders (bad for the person) and ethical disorders (bad for the community). ↩︎
I am a Zettler
@Sascha said:
You are definitely right there.
I currently lack this goal structure you mention. Most of the time I have a sense of goal when I do certain things, but as you say, then it's easier to half ass it.
The worst for me I think it's that anxiety becomes a fuel to engage further in this kind of "junk" activities, perpetuating that state in a vicious cycle. May I ask then, what is your definition of a good leisure activity? Most people consider leisure an activity where you can turn your brain off and just consume something without thinking too much about it. One can watch a movie just to be entertained for its own sake, while another individual watches the same movie with the goal of understanding more about plot building and appreciating the job of the director and the skill of the actors in his/her road to become a movie critic as a leisure hobby.
Wow, this paragraph defined my recent struggle. I lost all hope in myself and felt afraid of tackling any meaningful project because I thought I'd never be able to have what it required. I started meditating, setting some small goals, started to manage my time and incorporated healthy habits. Long story short I was able to stop taking anti-depressants. It's scary the amount of things we let go just because we indulge in harmful hobbies.
I appreciated it. It's excellent advice and serves me right in my struggle to become better everyday.
I'd like to know what is your definition of rubbish. My guess is any kind of activity that lacks a negative feedback loop and that is high reward/low cost. It will be helpful to know because if not just to say an example, what would be the purpose of quitting tobacco if I replaced it with weed. When our brains feel tired of doing meaningful deep work, what are the alternatives outside of the workplace?
Sounds amazing!
Thanks for sharing your insight and experience here.
In German, there is an awesome word for that, "Zerstreuung". The literal meaning is something like dispersion, dissipation, scattering. But is also used for amusement and distractibility.
I did a pretty extensive podcast on meditation (8-10h), sadly in German. This was the exact term to describe anti-meditation.
But there is no complicatedness to finding good leisure activities:
Leisure activities are all activities that give you energy. (I never heard from anybody that watching a Netflix series gives you energy, unless you are really into the series, which turns the passive aspect into an active one)
Example of my own life:
Spending time with my daughter. The goal: Improve her coordination, teach her general skills, give my wife a break, slowly increase her emotional independence from my wife.*
This might be the best point to describe my personal philosophy. My goal is not to have fun with my daughter or entertain her. Fun is always the well-deserved gift for spending meaningful time with my daughter (my work on meaning would be too technical and long to include it here). Most of the time, my daughter has something in mind (e.g. training for 20 min going up and down the curbstone...). If not, the world is providing plenty of invitations to improve all kinds of skills.
But if you would compare us with 95 % of the other parent-child couples, (sadly!) we are having (me included) the most fun, including me. We are both living in the moment, high on live. I have no problems with patience because I don't need to watch her fun-o-meter to become full, so I can finally go home. While today, it seems the norm, that the children wear their parents out, for us, the limiting factor is my daughter which means she can live her life to the fullest, not limited by me. This is how I remember my father and grandfather spent time with me.
The flip side is that I get all the energy I need from her. I can partake in her self-unfolding to a complete person and her enthusiasm.
So, whenever I'd switch to something toxic (becoming passive, letting her engage with passive activities), I'd lose this synergy.
This is the strange paradox: If I talk to other parents about my thinking process, I am met with some resistance. Too calculated, goal-driven etc. Yet, reality gives lie to those push-backs.
So, you see, it is not just about the type of activity. I walk, read and go up and down the curbstone for leisure. Sure, the types of activities are important (reading instead of listening to audiobooks, walking in fresh air instead of imprinting one's butt on the sofa). But only if the activities are connected to the meaning in your life and Meaning (capital M) they can truly give you energy.
tl;dr: Treat positive emotion as a by-product.
Awesome!
The sad part about it: Most of both the problems and solutions are known for millennia.
Perhaps, the best rule of thumb might be: Don't do anything that was made accessible after the 19th century.
I have to temper the presentation of my philosophy: Very small and infrequent dosages in the right context can be well tolerated. Yesterday, my wife wanted to have ice cream from McDonalds. We walked there and I ate three hamburgers. I LOVE McDonalds (might have something to do with my general sensitivity to anything rewarding). Still, I spent time with my family, was outside, and I eat at McDonalds once a season or something like that.
I am a Zettler
Some Nassim Taleb advice (in reference to him saying he has read 30hrs a week for decades):
Extends to projects too. Noticing I'm not bored of the activity, just the project/book has increased my amount of reading/project output.
So I read in parallel, unless a project/book is so valuable to me that I go all in.
Zettelkasten is love. Zettelkasten is life.
I love Taleb's work and his need to anger the internet, but this advice is just a permission to be driven by hedonism.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha said:
It would be hedonism if you switched from reading the tiring publication to reading a fun publication that is unrelated to your research projects. But if you switch to another publication that you have to read for your research anyway, with the intention to come back to the other publication at a certain time, it's a common mental energy management technique, just like switching between sections of your manuscript when writing.
I have to start learning German! That was my goal 2 years ago but sadly I stopped it.
Thanks, I listened to a summary of the book by Thebaut Meurisse to complement what you say here. I removed everything from my phone and I've been using Youtube only as a source for information (for example the videos you guys have made) rather than entertainment and also removed coffee from my day to day diet.
Will do that this Sunday, thanks for the idea! I recall a book called "Ready, Aim, Fire!" which is excellent to teach you how to create goals.
In this case I added to my Bujo a thought, to remind myself for every activity if it's actually helping me accomplish something. If not I just don't do it. This helped me to stop cravings even from food, because eating junk isn't aligned with my vision of being healthy.
BTW, have you thought about your life being a "small business", in the way that you need a mission, values, vision, objectives, be a leader. Just yesterday I realized the are many parallels between a small-business and having a family.
Great definition, thank you! I've never considered that before.
This Sunday I'll think about my life in terms of the "Life buckets" Cal Newport talks about, where there is Craft, Community, Contemplation and Constitution. The idea is that you cultivate habits that help you accomplish the goals in this areas of your life.
Thanks for your help, it definitely pointed me to the right direction and some books to learn more about that and actually do it.
BTW, this reminded me of the following in Marcus Aurelius Meditations [2.16]: "The human soul dishonors itself when... fifth, it fails to direct any of its actions or impulses toward a goal, but instead acts without purpose and without attention, when even the slightest actions should be carried out with reference to the end".
I don't see the contradiction: The mental energy management is then used to deal with hedonism.
Nassim Taleb didn't write:
He wrote:
So, yes. Either you use mental energy management to cope with the spirit draining effects of hedonism, or you decide to grow in character. (In practice, both are needed to some extent!)
I'd rather opt for grit and then admit to using a management technique when I am truly out of mental resources, instead of giving up the minute I am confronted with some inner resistance.
I am a Zettler
Often I've got at least half a dozen books going at once, though I wouldn't really call it parallel reading. It's closer to serial reading in fits and spurts.
I am working on a project at the moment which does have me reading about 30 books in parallel in what Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren would call syntopical reading. If you've not read it, the methods there can dramatically change and improve your reading methods depending on what you're hoping to get out of each work.
Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
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@chrisaldrich I'll add it to my reading list, thank you!