Quantifying and Time Tracking My Reading | Hacker News Reader

Quantifying and Time Tracking My Reading

cflynn.us

41 pointscflynnus7 comments

Maybe I’ll sound like an old fogey for saying this, but... I enjoy reading and I feel like this level of analysis would take all the joy out of it. With exercise you are competing against your past self to gain strength and endurance. With reading, what is the goal to optimize against? I think it would be more valuable to summarize and annotate thoughts as you read the book rather than measuring your progress through it by page count.

I do find some value in quantification but I resonate with your thoughts. I am curious about ways in which people summarize and take notes when reading books. Do you have any specific quirks or methods for doing so?

I've somewhat shifted my focus from plain note taking to making spaced repetition flashcards (using Anki). I find it to be a lot more effective in aiding memory retention of details.

For me, personally, my goal is to maximize the amount of knowledge and understanding I can acquire per unit of time. As part of this I guess I'm testing myself to see how long I can focus for each day I devote to studying, and to see if once I've quantified it, if I can beat it.

I guess after thinking more on this, I'm not so much focused on "how many pages can I read per day" as I am "how long can I stay focused and study per day"

Also, since I wrote this I've started using spaced repetition flashcards (with Anki) to better retain details as I read through books. I've found that spaced repetition flashcards let me relax a bit while I'm reading because I don't feel like it's so important that I immediately remember everything as soon as I read it since I'll be revisiting it later. This seems to work much better than just taking notes.

I've always had a fascination with tracking things myself. I remember daydreaming when I was younger about wishing I had some kind of way to see how many of some particular food item I'd eaten over the course of my life, or how many words I'd ever spoken. I never got too heavily into making my own spreadsheets, but I got into tracking running and walking with apps like runkeeper, using a site to track every movie I watched, tracking each video game I owned and whether I had beaten it yet, and when I couldn't find a good site for tracking the TV shows I'd watched I did make a very simple spreadsheet for that.

Over time I've pulled away from the practice somewhat as I've started to think the obsession with tracking my activities was detracting from the experience somewhat. I'd end up thinking more about adding to my total miles walked on my tracker than enjoying the walk itself. On a level as granular as tracking 10-page chunks of books you must be getting distracted on some level from the actual content, I would think.

I still use that tracking site for movies and I do use Goodreads for books, and I find them great resources for figuring out what to read/watch next, but those are now more secondary to the actual enjoyment of the experience itself.

Good stuff. One thing you are missing though. I like to measure my reading by quality too.

I simply keep a manual tally counter by my side while reading and every time I catch myself reading mindlessly or my mind drifting away, I count one distraction. Similar to some forms of meditation.

Ultimately, you want to bring up the quality by minimizing the number of distractions per unit of time.

The good thing about it is that you actually build up your focus and concentration "muscle" (in prefrontal cortex) as opposed to amping up the volume alone.

I too got inspired by gym :)

That sounds like a good idea, currently when "zoning out" or getting distracted I don't record it I just try to jump back. For quality, the best thing I've come up with is making spaced-repetition flashcards w/ Anki. My confidence is higher that I've actually retained the information.

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