A few mornings ago I opened my daily review and stopped on this: “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Here’s the strange part. I didn’t highlight that line. I’ve been…
The two books that pushed me into my reading slump are still on my shelf. Deep Work and Atomic Habits — both abandoned somewhere around the first-quarter mark, both with bookmarks I’m too honest to remove. So when I finally went looking for a book to get out of a reading slump, I almost made…
Last night I read the same paragraph four times. Not a difficult paragraph. A novel I actually like. Somewhere between the second and third attempt, my hand had already picked up my phone. I don’t remember deciding to. If you’ve searched “how to focus while reading,” you’ve probably already read the standard advice. Put your…
I once owned a whole set of colored highlighters, marked up every book I read, and remembered almost none of it. Half the time, the remembering problem starts earlier — I couldn’t even stay focused on the page long enough to have something worth keeping. The system was supposed to be foolproof. Highlight the good…
There are two books on my shelf with a bookmark stuck around the one-quarter mark, and they’ve been sitting like that for a long time. Atomic Habits. Deep Work. I didn’t abandon them because they were bad. That’s the part that took me a while to understand. Bad books are easy to quit — you…
Half a year has gone by and I haven’t finished a single book the way I’d hoped to. Not for lack of trying. There’s a stack on my nightstand — three started, none past the halfway mark. I pick one up, read a page, realize I’ve absorbed nothing, and put it back down. Some nights…
I read slowly. Not “I wish I read more” slowly. I mean I can sit with a book for thirty minutes and realize I’ve read the same paragraph three times because my mind wandered off to something I forgot to reply to. I’ve been like this for more than two years. Long enough that I…