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Suggestions for Reading Effectively

We’re starting a book club with the students at the UX bootcamp I teach at. My colleague Edijs asked me to share a few of my notes on how to get the most out of a reading experience, a topic I have a lot of interest in as it relates to my side project. For almost 2 years now I’ve been building a tool called @Lurnby for exactly that - facilitating more effective reading and personal knowledge management.

I figured this would be great as one of my first blog posts for Lurnby. Whenever I get around to making that blog :D

The ideas I share below are my own interpretation on what makes for effective learning based on the different books and ideas I have consumed. My practice is constantly evolving and I’m always trying to find new ideas for how to improve it. I’m particularly interested in finding “good questions”, so please share those with me!

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First some core ideas

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1. There are different kinds of reading.

* Reading for pleasure
* Reading for knowledge
* Reading for understanding

Reading for pleasure

Means reading as an enjoyable experience. We can learn things, we can understand things, we can influence our thinking - but those aren’t the goals, and any such outcome comes about naturally.

Reading for information

Means reading for awareness. These are things like reading the news. While we do learn things as a result of this, we don’t tend to understand more. We learn new dates, or new facts, we become aware of events and trends. But we don’t change our thinking or perspectives.

Reading for understanding

Means reading to change your thinking, your perception of the world, and thus changing yourself. It is an active form of reading where we are purposefully trying to use what we read as a way to reflect on our mental models and to learn something new that changes how we interact with the world.
My notes for how to get the most out of your reading experience, mostly apply to reading for understanding. You don’t really need them for the other kinds of reading.

2. Reading for understanding is hard. 😄

One of the rare cases where you don’t need a tl;dr.

3. An understanding of how we learn, helps us learn.

* We learn by association and networking.
* We learn by teaching and explaining.
* We learn by forgetting and remembering.

Association and networking

By connecting ideas to things we already know, we have a much easier time remembering something. It’s like when we are already expert UX practitioners, we have an easier time learning and remembering new tools and methods. That new information enters into a connected network of related ideas. Any connected node, can become a pathway towards the new information we are trying to learn. By contrast, information that isn’t connected, doesn’t have a lot of pathways for you to arrive at it and remember it.

Teaching and explaining

Attempting to explain something we’ve learned to another person, makes us simplify and organize the information we have. We are actively trying to remember the idea and explain it to someone else who doesn’t have access to the context and information we had. This process leads to a deeper understanding of the information because we are creating a narrative around it, and it often also leads to a deeper understanding of how little we ourselves understood.

Forgetting and remembering

We naturally forget information. Things that we aren’t using on a daily basis, are deemed unimportant. We’ve all had the experience of reading a book and then not remembering most of the details a few months later. Remembering is a choice though, and we learn by making that choice. Just like our immune systems get stronger every time we have an illness to fight off, the same concept of antifragility applies to our memories. Every time we try to remember something, we reinforce the pathways for arriving at that memory, and signal our brains that this is something we want. When we’ve already forgotten something, our brain has to work harder to bring it back to the surface. That effort leads to deeper retention, because the pathways are strengthened in proportion to that effort. But like all infrastructure, it needs to be maintained and repaired.

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Reading effectively

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The key methods

Below I’ll share some of what I consider the best practices are for more effective reading. But keep in mind that I believe any system needs to be empathetic and modular. You don’t need to do all of these things all the time. We don’t always have the time or energy to invest in this. Any good personal system should take that reality into mind and help us do as much as we can and want to at the moment.

* Read with a pen (or the digital equivalent).
* Practice remembering.
* Share what you’re learning

1. Read with a pen (or the digital equivalent)

This really means being active while you are reading. It could be underlining or highlighting ideas and passages, or it could be writing notes and reflections in response to what you’re reading. There are many different ways to go about this, but here are a few that I really like. These can be asked in response to individual highlights or in response to sections and chapters.

A. Generalize something by asking - What’s the universal concept or idea in this?

B. Find connections and build networks - What else does this remind me of?

C. Tease out your existing mental models and biases - Why do I agree or disagree with what the author is saying?

D. Make it actionable by running through the following question loop:
1. How can I use this?
2. Why must I use this?
3. When will I use this?

These questions do a really good job of putting your brain through the circuit necessary to make the information stickier.

  • The first helps you run through all possible applications of the new information.

  • The second helps you think through possible biases and actual needs and use cases.

  • The third makes you imagine scenarios in which you will actually apply this, tying it to intention and creating a trigger

2. Practice remembering

This means treating the act of remembering something like you would treat learning a new sport or a musical instrument. Which means understanding that practice is everything. It means reviewing, repeating, recalling.

Review your notes and highlights

Either using an actual system, or even sporadically by setting up calendar reminders to just glance through them from time to time.

Active recall and summaries

After you read a chapter, immediately try to list out everything you remember on a sheet of paper. Do this again after a few days. Do this again a week later.

Create flash cards

Consider taking some of the most important ideas and concepts from what you’ve read and just turning them into flash cards where you have a question on one side, and an answer on the other. Writing good flash cards is an art. Bad flashcards can make you feel like the whole system is useless

3. Share what you’re learning

This one is pretty self explanatory. And although the actual sharing bit is great as it can lead to dialogue, the most important part is in putting the information into a format that’s shareable and explanatory.

  1. Tell a friend or acquaintance about what you read.
  2. Share a reflection on social media
  3. Write an article about it
  4. Notice moments where something is applicable and highlight that.

Tell a friend or acquaintance about what you read.

Hey, I just read this interesting thing about …
Hey, did you know …
I read this article about x today, you won’t believe what happens next …

Share a reflection on social media

I’m reading this book and thought this quote was interesting. It makes me think about …
I read this things today and think it’s outrageous because …

Write an article about it

  • This can be simply an explanation of the content in your own words
  • This can be an application of the content as it relates to a topic of your choice. For example: “How the principles of Ultralearning make me a better UX researcher”

Notice moments where something is applicable

Look for moments in your everyday life where you can say - oh, that’s the thing that the author was talking about. Share those moments with others. For example: “Hey I noticed you’re thinking about going back to uni, I recently read something interesting that I think relates to it in this book Ultralearning. Here’s the gist and some more info in case it resonates with you.”

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That’s the short of it 😅

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Not that short honestly. But really, this is just the surface. There is a lot of room for going deeper on these discussions, as well as the reality that everyone does best when they find strategies that work with their specific personalities and energy levels. But I hope that there is something here for you to get more out of your reading experiences and personal development.

  1. 2

    Nice. I struggle with reading to understand. I try to use some of these strategies and get pretty tired by the end of it. And yet I feel there are some people, like my former roommate, who can seemingly easily internalize and recite what they've read, while others like me can only remember it once its brought up. Like a song you only know the words to when it plays. I need the cheat codes.

    Separately, one of my favourite books on this topic is Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. I caught my coworker reading it at his desk one day and burst out laughing. I ended up reading it and loved it. Very thorough and philosophical.

    1. 2

      Haha. That's a great analogy, needing the cheat codes :D

      Yeah, I definitely notice differences across different people with how they can internalize and remember what they read. I have a theory that it's very largely based on personalities too.

      I would say that if looking just at that example you provided of you and your friend. I'm much closer on the spectrum to your friend than I am to you. I tend to internalize and remember things relatively well. But I think a large reason for that is that when I get excited by some information, I tend to share it with other people naturally. My wife is on the receiving end of a 20 minute monologue from me sharing something I read quite often. Not always to her pleasure :D.

      I think that's a personality trait of mine - the desire to share something. And I think with different people, small strategies like that build up over time to make it seem like some people naturally have some predisposition towards memory because some of their "strategies" are just subconscious behavior. And while it is natural in some sense, as much of our personalities are, it doesn't mean that it's exclusive. Because it just tends to mean that some people have a natural predisposition to have habits that are more effective towards certain things than others.

      But just cause those habits don't come naturally to you, doesn't mean that you can't acquire them with some concerted effort. And then you can end up with quite a similar result.

      Outside of memory, this probably doesn't apply to things that are clear physical advantages (I can't become a beach volleyball olympian given the reality of my height) , or things that are really the outcome of massive time investment (I can't quickly acquire something someone spent years honing and developing without an equally significant time investment).

      Re the getting tired bit. Me too XD.

      It's pretty damn hard, and also when it comes to things like this - reading and remembering more effectively, it's really hard to actually notice the outcomes. It's not like taking a figma or a coding course and literally seeing new skills and abilities as you go. So it makes it hard to continue with the work sometimes because it's really easy to just wonder if it really matters for much of anything.

      Personally, I know that it does, I've noticed repeated benefits in my personal life to adopting specific strategies like those above. But I try to leave myself with options. Some days I have more energy than others, and some days I have less. I think a good system should account for that.

      In Lurnby, I tried to put this into practice by focusing on the highlight as the minimum entry point with multiple ways to put in more effort if needed. All you have to do is just read and highlight passages. The highlights get stored and become an item that you can then act on later. You can of course add notes to the highlight right away, and you can even add tags to the highlight to start connecting it with other information, but none of that is necessary. Those can all be added in later if I want. And the spaced repetition review feature naturally surfaces those highlights to me systematically. Each review is a chance to show up with more energy and add in notes or tags. Or not ... haha. It's also a chance to not do those things and to just reread that highlight again and meditate a bit on why I thought it was important enough to highlight.

      In short, I can scale my efforts up or down as much as I need to. The minimum requirement is just reading and highlighting (in Lurnby of course XD). And I can trust that there's a system that naturally supports me.

      Re Mortimer Adler - I've also been reading that! Super slowly though. The section above I wrote about how there's different kinds of reading is HEAVILY influenced by that book. Glad to know you enjoyed it. And it's the perfect title to a book. How To Read a Book. It would indeed be surreal to walk in on someone reading that book.

      Reminds me of those meta memes like - pictures of people taking pictures of food.

      1. 2

        It's a cool problem to work on. I hope you solve for it because I know there's a lot of people that get somewhat discouraged at their inability to clearly remember their non-fiction reads. Myself included. Godspeed!

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