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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

Memory is OK its the concentration. I just can't read a whole novel now, its too long. Sitting down and doing work is ridiculously hard to concentrate.

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What helped me with reading was:

1) Read on a Kindle or any other e-ink reader. It's always just in the spot you left it in and it's light enough to carry around everywhere. I usually read while I eat and continue to the end of the chapter after I'm done eating. Try to open a book instead of Reddit/Instagram/Facebook/HN

2) Read something fun. You don't need to pick stuff that's super-deep or insightful or productive. Pick a simple "Main character is really good at $thing but doesn't know it yet" -book. Skip the 1000 page monsters. My suggestions: Bobiverse and the Murderbot series.

One of my issues is grabbing the phone to kill time while waiting even for a small amount of time.

Ordered a bagel? Let me grab my phone for the 2 minutes it takes for them to call my number.

In an uber ride? Turn on the phone...

Waiting for a deploy? Let me scroll through reddit a bit.

I love the kindle, but reading a page at a time here and there isn't appealing to me, personally.

Instead, I've been trying to make a conscious effort to just be aware of my present physical space instead of grabbing for my phone during those little waits. I'm old enough to have grown up without a phone until after I graduated. I /know/ that I'll be perfectly fine without picking up my phone... but this habit of constant digital information ingestion is hard to break.

I just installed an ereader on my phone so that I can open that instead of this website and it works about half the time

I put the book I'm reading right on my home screen. Open screen, press cover of book, opens to where I left off

I put the Kindle app on my first page of apps and all the time sink apps deep inside a folder on the last page of apps. I even named the folder "No". It's still hard to stay away, but I am definitely reading more often.

I actually took stress-management class at an old job. It was taught by 3 actual psychologists studying stress and it's effects on people.

The main thing I retained from that was that your body has power over your mind.

I, for example, tend to _always_ grab my phone when waiting for the elevator. Now, as per their instructions, I take 3 deep breaths first and then grab the phone.

It's amazing how much that changes the way you use it. You relax a bit and don't get the urge to doomscroll on Twitter or Reddit.

It also shows you how bad you are at breathing. Modern humans tend to breathe fast and shallow and it signals "emergency" to your body. Deep breathing or box breathing completely changes your mindset. No need to do any fancy mindfulness or meditation, just breathe.

I solved it by practicing a sport, exercising regularly.

Going outdoors for an extenuating exercise during an hour every other day.

Improved everything about my cognitive abilities in a big way.

Thank you for the tip.

The book “The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)] by Nicholas G Carr discusses this as well. Essentially, the content we consume is just one part of the picture if you think about how our minds are shaped, the medium we consume that content through also shapes how we think.

Many of us don’t read left-to-right top-to-bottom anymore, we skim over blog posts and articles looking for keywords and then read the paragraphs or sentences around those keywords.

I had the same problem and I was able to solve it by timeboxing reading as if it was work, even though it's a hobby. I get comfy, but on some ambient music, and set my little desk timer to about 40 minutes. It's set to not beep when time runs out. I'll start reading, and for the first 20 minutes or so I'll still feel kind of antsy and keep looking at the clock, but 9/10 times I end up finally getting engrossed in what I'm reading and I don't even notice that the timer ended. By then I'm in the groove and am good to read for a couple of hours.

great if you're capable of timeboxing otherwise.

not all of us are exactly that... mechanical.

I wasn't trying to prescribe that everyone do this, I just tend to post the methods I've come up with to deal with my ADHD because sometimes it helps people. Obviously it won't work for everyone, which is why I only used "I" statements in my original comment.

Walking around with a notebook (the paper kind, I like the small pocket sized ones with no rules so you can write music and draw things too) instead of a phone and then coming home and typing what you wrote into a computer is awesome. I wrote a memory allocator and a long form blog post while I was out the other day this way.

For a while I was writing a program to recognize a special kind of rune-like manuscript so the typing part is unnecessary but I realized it's less work to just sit down and type the stuff in. That's not too hard to get distracted from and it gives you way more flexibility.

I upgraded my notebook to a disconnected iPad Mini with great results. The iPad is my read and write device. It's not for work or media consumption. It does not get notifications.

You're right, having just you and a blank page is a great way to work. I try to start the day with just coffee and my iPad. No internet.

Might want to get checked for ADHD. There are good treatments available.

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