How do you organise your reading?

Learnt this from my twitter/email exchanges with some productive people I know and it has been serving me quite well so far:

1. Don’t read the referenced articles before you’re done with the original/current one. (Maintain a document of references if needed)

2. If you already have more than 5 tabs opened on a same topic, switch to a new window instead of a new tab with just the current article. Helps with the distraction.

3. Read in multiple-passes instead of a focused single-pass.

3.1. Pass 1: Skim through the structure of the post and the comment section for some context.

3.2. Pass 2: If you find it worthwhile, read through the post carefully and collate all the references and links in a document once you are through the post.

3.3. Pass 3: Skim through the references and embedded links to see if there is anything of value beyond what the original article had to provide. Look for the themes that inspired the original post.

3.4. Pass 4: Read through the ones that you found to be valuable i.e., the ones that had more(different) to offer than the original post.

3.5. Pass 5: Repeat 1 through 4.

(Note: If you are reading a paper or a book, during the 1st pass read through the Table of Contents, Bold faces, Headings, Abstract as part of skimming; Note all the jargons and key concepts in the second pass; and map these concepts and jargons to the known concepts during the 3rd pass; Now go through bibliography like in pass 4 and 5).

4. Be well rested before any cognitively demanding task, it doesn’t matter if it is a blogpost or a paper. And I seriously can’t emphasise the endurance benefits of being well rested when it comes to cognitive challenges even as trivial as cursory reading.

5. When reading try to read from the perspective of a specialist as opposed to a generalist, it helps with pruning the articles and tabs that you think are important but don’t serve beyond the session. You can still be a generalist, but the idea is to not be all over the place. This helps with the cognitive exhaustion and the feeling of being overwhelmed. A related idea would be to ask if I would still read it if I were to never talk about it ever to anyone. (Note: Also helps discern between curiosity and the laziness involved with evading responsibility in the name of curiosity).

6. You can use tools like Zotero, Evernote, etc for quickly jotting down interesting points in case of a single pass read, but I would say instead of doing that go for multipass and when you are done may be try to write a small commentary post debating the key ideas to solidify your understanding and post it here. Or conversely engage right away by commenting in the comment section.

7. Always timebox. Mine is usually 6pm-7pm everyday. If you are an infovore, you can make it everyday 7-9 or something like that. I do that because I have a pretty low capacity for consumption, but I can adhere to my own schedule. If you cannot try to time it with your office commute time etc.

I use Pocket to manage my reading. Google Keep, Evernote, and sending yourself emails with links seem like reasonable alternatives. There are some more specialized tools for academic reading, but that doesn't sound like what would be useful to you here.

Funny you're asking this, I have the same problem and had an idea about a solution.

Even though recent events forced me to delay the coding, I am hopeful that this can help me do a dynamic semi-selfsorted list where I can dump all the things I want to read (be it articles, books, studies etc) and help me get to the bottom of it. I will of course make the code available somewhere.

Here's the link to my previous comment that explained this [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Here's the text directly :

The idea is to have an sql database that contains everything you want to do. The python script picks 2 entries and ask "If you die in a year from now, wich activity minimized regret the most?". The answer will probably be a cursor from activity1 <-> neutral <-> activity2. The scores are then calculated using the ELO scoring. This pair comparison algorithm allows to quickly rank your lifegoals by importance.

But that's only half of it. It will also ask "which activity takes the most time to complete?/If you had one hour, which would be a better investment?" to rank activities by time to complete (also using ELO).

If you do a few comparison a day and don't add too many entries you can then display a rank by "importance score minus by time score" to see what is the most important thing to you that also takes the less time. Or something like that. I expect some fine tuning for this.

The idea is to have an optimized and dynamic todolist that can help you to juggle between short time goals and life goals.

I'm thinking of managing my "toread" list the same way, but automatically deriving the time score from the length of the article.

What do you guys think? Any idea how to make this better? I just started and plan to learn quite a bit by trying to make this work. Any opinion is much appreciated. I will put this on github at the end. Should I publish it here also?

Btw, the idea came to me after reading through this : https://www.gwern.net/Resorter

Thanks gwern!

What do you think? Any ideas are appreciated.

ps : I intend to use this to sort my reading queue but also a general TODO of pretty much everything as well as a watch list of my movies.

Are all those things about the same concepts, or wildly different? If they are wildly different, I would advise consuming less, spending more time processing and sticking with one inquiry at a time.

At least in my experience, whenever I had too much to read, I actually was procrastinating. I wasn't really reading that stuff, I was only avoiding something else. So I would go ahead and close all those tabs and forget all those PDFs. Some you will remember, and then only do those, and process them a bit before going further (i.e. think about them in the shower).

LessWrong now has bookmarks (triple-dot or on hover-preview), albeit without any lists currently. I find a bit nicer than using Pocket or Chrome bookmarks.

If you have many tabs open, bookmark the ones you aren't using, then close them. Open the bookmark when it's time to read it.

Currently-open tabs corresponding to active resources is helpful for maintaining clarity, and you get a nice list of things that you previously expressed interest in reading.

I have just like you a lot of .pdf and articles saved in Pocket. Once a month I go through all of them and add those I really want to read to "Next Actions" (GTD style). I try to keep the number within what I know that I am able to do every month, like 10-15, and if the next month I have not finished I know I need to put less

This kinda works

I have books organized by lists, with at least some semblance of weekly goals in terms of getting through them (unfortunately I put stuff like Kant right at the beginning, so I've been failing a lot).

then I have Feed.ly feeding me the updates on my favourite blogs. I read everything with up to two pages of text on the spot. everything else goes to a list which I keep in my self-inbox on Telegram. I read at least one of them a day, in chronological order.

I am currently reading the whole of Unqualified Reservations as well, and I usually read whole blogs. these I keep in my mobile chrome app, and save the links to the telegram list.