Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

Ever find yourself sitting in a class next to this guy:

On the little scrap of a desk he has a tape recorder, the text book open where he stops to furiously take anything anyone says about anything, and a latop where he desperately tries to capture every word anyone speaks? You’ll recognize him by the strain on his face, like he’s passing a stone, and the desperate fear in his eyes.

I call this note overkill. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to tape record class or take careful notes - that’s your business, we all learn differently and far be it from me to tell you what you must or must not do.

But taking good notes doesn’t mean writing every word down. In fact, I’d say those are terrible notes.

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 A few days back I wrote a bit about the process of reading academically, and how the “tricks” we may learn to read other books do not work so well in these environments. A while back I mentioned a bit of this as well, producing a “Reading” cheatsheet you can get here as well as some “reading note cards.”

Lifehack.org has written an excellent follow up post discussing those “tricks” that DO help.

1. Skim the book. Examine the table of contents to get a feeling for the structure and main points of the book. Flip through the chapters, skimming the first few paragraphs of each, and then the section headings. Check the index for any topics you feel are especially important. Then, if you have time;
2. Read the Introduction and conclusion. Most of the author’s theoretical position will be laid out in the introduction, along with at least a summary of the chapters and sections within. The conclusion revisits much of these points, and usually gives a good overview of the data or other evidence. Sometimes the conclusion is not marked as such; in this case, read the last chapter. Then, if you have time;
3. Dip in. Read the chapters that seem most relevant or interesting. Get a sense for what the author is trying to accomplish. Flip through the rest of the book and look more closely at anything that catches your eye. Then, if you have time;
4. Finish the book. Read the whole thing. If you know you’ll have time, skip 1 - 3 and just read, cover to cover.

For a lot more like this, and a book that taught me a great deal with tips like those above and more, is the classic: How to Read a Book.

For me, academic productivity isn’t just about getting good grades. It’s about getting an education. You can get through school with good grades and without an education - people do it all the time. Why I strive to find better ways to learn and succeed is not only so that I may do better in school, but so that I may learn more.

Learning how to read more effectively is one of those topics that always grabs me. There is so much I want to read, so many ideas I want to explore and so little time. Marx, Dostoevsky, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Berger. Many of the blogs I read seem to be ready to offer such hints in ways I may get more done in this regard, but what I realized just now is how little the productivity blogs and academic blogs really connect on this point.

Productivity blogs are full of posts about speed reading, reading more, etc. It’s all systems. And that’s great, because systems are what productivity people do. But you can also get a sense of just what they’re reading, and why many of these methods are not remotely productive for academic work (outside of text books proper, as they are actually designed in the same way many of these productivity and business books many of these sites are concerned with.)

Why is this important? Because such tips can and do lead people astray. It’s great when you’re reading books with very little… value content, shall we say. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but there is a great deal of difference in weight and subtly between “Getting Things Done” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” or to take a book I’m reading for an independent study right now: “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker. And for that matter, any scholarly paper or text in general.

This is not to say some of this is not useful, but it is important to “grain of salt” all of this. Most these tips will work on the New York Times bestseller list, and many books at your local Borders - but not most of what you’ll be expected to read in college (hopefully, at least.) These books specialize in a very specific formula: telling you what they will tell you, making the points, backing up the points, eventually tie it all together. Most academic reading is, of course, the same. The difference is learning “you need an inbox” is quite a bit different than learning the intricacies and implications of the Oedipal complex (crazy as it may be) or what the Clash of Civilization is and what it implies. They are not even in the same class, with all due respect to Mr. Allen.

Most the time in school what you need to do is very simple:

Sit down with the book, a pen and paper, and perhaps a computer (I use my phone, I can get to a dictionary or wikipedia from it if I need to look something up, but just about anything else is inconvenient.)

And from that point, you read. That’s it. You go through and read the book, you underline important points and passages, pay special attention to introductions and conclusions, be sure to note special terminology, names and dates and that’s it. Maybe afterward take notes on the text.

There is a time for technology and clever tricks. There is also a time for elbow grease. If you want to get anything out of novel by Hermann Hesse or the Histories of Herodotus, skimming won’t do it.

As I believe Cal Newport points out in one of his books (I don’t recall which at the moment) it is true there are books you can get away not reading, and books you can get away not reading all. I do it all the time. Hell, some professors assign both bad texts and texts you never even discuss - that’s part of this game. But in many cases you do need to read, and if you try anything too fancy you are going to miss a great deal of the meat (and, by the way, the actual education) a book offers.

Just something to think about. What do you think?