In #82, I asked you to share some struggles that your are facing in trying to build a new habit. Karthik Srinivasan was the first to respond. He writes:
…so over the last year or so I have fallen behind in my reading and now my reading list is made of a number of books, hundreds of articles and blog posts and annual reports. The list and volume is now grown to such an extent that I now feel a little overwhelmed by the list which is impacting my reading even more.
Would be great to hear if you have faced something similar and how have you managed to address it.
What tips can we offer to Karthik? (click on the comment button below to post your views)
focus on where you derive your best insights from. curtail any low signal to noise sources. if it isnt an obvious keep, then it should be an obvious leave.
My experience: Keep collecting books, articles, blog posts, annual reports etc. Besides you must have your top priorities. Keep your reading serves your priorities. Read for execution & read for learning as habit on free time. You must finish one by one for your main tasks, including your top priority reading. Others is likely savings for free time to read. You should write down your priorities, including materials to read. Set goals to finish them gradually and review them very often. To me, reading should serve my job and help me learn and grow. Read to get what remains, others could be forgotten. If you cannot finish all readings which I make sure most of them are non-essentials, don't feel upset. In the end, the quality of your reading is more important than the quantity.
Best way to develop new Habit is to study your existing habits and how you are spending your time. I started making notes of my time spend for 6 months. I use to make a note of my hourly activities including my talk on phones with whom and how much time i spend. Over a period of time I realised that I was wasting lot of time on things which was irrelevant for me and was of no value addition to me. Then I started cutting all that unproductive time and diverted the same for my passion which is reading. I follow simple principle - ROTI = Return On Time Invested. Something similar to what we do for our investee companies where we track ROCE.
I struggle with the same thing, but I've found it helpful to re-frame it as a pointless struggle.
Was walking with a friend, discussing this exact same dilemma and we made the point that simply over the course of our two hour walk together there was probably enough NEW & GREAT content produced in that short time to keep us engaged for years!
At any point all we are doing is dipping a thimble in the ocean.
I'm trying to forget completely about the list of what I'm missing and simply enjoy what I'm reading and being grateful for the time I get to read.
No matter how brilliant one is, there is NO chance to get on top of even a tiny fraction of all the great things to read, watch, listen to etc..
It's a pointless pursuit that's doomed to failure.
Revel in the reading and forget about the unread.
As to priorities, I'm drawn to choosing what I think I'll enjoy the most, do enough of that and the rest usually takes care of itself.
I struggled with this too but the key thing remember is that when you are overwhelmed the easiest thing to do is to give up. Thats one thing you must not do. Some of the options
1) prioritise - Chose the news feeds you like and make sure you atleast read all of them
2) Listen if you cant read - i have started using podcasts, audible and other audio tools to replace reading. Listen when walking or doing mundane tasks that dont need you to focus.
3) replace noise with matter - some newsletters sound enticing but are a time suck. Focus on what matters
4) some times its good to save for later. If you have to get other things done bookmark important things for later. You dont always need to read it now... later is as good
5) cut wasteful social media like insta and FB from your phone. They are like a spiral vortex. Sometimes they just suck time away without adding any value. Mindless peering at other peoples activities is a waste.
Given the pace at which information is generated today, it is perfectly normal to feel over-whelmed about it. The fear of missing out on something interesting/informative to read will always remain at the back of the head.
As investors there is a similar feeling we face when it comes our portfolios. We invest knowing very well that we will commit an error of omission. The universe of investible assets is far larger than what can fit into our portfolio. We thus accept that errors of omission will be far more common than errors of commission. Similarly, with reading, we need to accept that we cannot read it all.
This issue of not being able to read it all is not new, though. Concepts like anti-library (https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/) and Tsundoku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) are proof that people have always had more information available than they can consume. We should therefore not worry about not being able to read everything.
There are other marginal ideas that can help as well:
-> Time-management: Making time to read more is a subject that is widely discussed. I have nothing new to add to it. For anyone that is unfamiliar, Seneca's 'On the Shortness of Time' is the best place to start. Some of the comments above are also helpful.
-> Prioritisation: Clearly, when there is so much to read, we need to prioritise on what to read. More importantly, we need to give up reading anything that we think is not adding value. In this respect, be like the child who quickly moves from one toy to another as soon as he gets bored (although there may be some topics that may require you to endure - more the exceptions than norms).
-> Objective Based Learning: Another form of prioritisation is reading deliberately to find answers to questions that you have. This can help you skim through a lot of material as you know exactly what you are looking for. This is in contrast to the general reading that we do which is more exploratory in nature.
-> Read It Later Apps: Apps like Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket, Notion etc that let you save articles can be very helpful. If I come across something that seems interesting but I cant manage to read at the moment, I add it my Evernote library. I try and tag the article while adding. In this way, even if I cant get to reading the whole article later (Evernote is also an anti-library for me), I can still find it when I am thinking/writing about a particular topic. Taking the few extra seconds to tag that article is a high-leverage (high return on time invested) activity for me.
-> Outsourcing: This is something that I discovered only a week or so back on twitter (https://twitter.com/DaveCBeck/status/1407019257217654784?s=20). I haven't tried it yet, but seems like an interesting way to learn something on the side (not a core project). This is more helpful in widening your interests rather than deepening your understanding.
I saw all the above are marginal ideas as they will help in making 5-10-15% improvements but not more. The most helpful is going to be the acceptance that you cannot read it all. Be comfortable in having a large anti-library. I usually have over 100 tabs open in my phone browser of half read articles. This is in addition to 1000s of un-read emails that I have of the various publications that I subscribe. Not to mention the barrage of research notes that are published each day. There is no way I can go through it all. I have put in place some systems to be a little efficient, but like I said, there are all marginal ideas.
In the time that will take you to read this sentence, 10,000 new tweets will appear on Twitter. If this pace of information broadcast overwhelms you, then this article (https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/01/27/info-overload-fake/) will provide an interesting perspective to you: Information overload is not as big a problem as we seem to feel it is.
focus on where you derive your best insights from. curtail any low signal to noise sources. if it isnt an obvious keep, then it should be an obvious leave.
My experience: Keep collecting books, articles, blog posts, annual reports etc. Besides you must have your top priorities. Keep your reading serves your priorities. Read for execution & read for learning as habit on free time. You must finish one by one for your main tasks, including your top priority reading. Others is likely savings for free time to read. You should write down your priorities, including materials to read. Set goals to finish them gradually and review them very often. To me, reading should serve my job and help me learn and grow. Read to get what remains, others could be forgotten. If you cannot finish all readings which I make sure most of them are non-essentials, don't feel upset. In the end, the quality of your reading is more important than the quantity.
Best way to develop new Habit is to study your existing habits and how you are spending your time. I started making notes of my time spend for 6 months. I use to make a note of my hourly activities including my talk on phones with whom and how much time i spend. Over a period of time I realised that I was wasting lot of time on things which was irrelevant for me and was of no value addition to me. Then I started cutting all that unproductive time and diverted the same for my passion which is reading. I follow simple principle - ROTI = Return On Time Invested. Something similar to what we do for our investee companies where we track ROCE.
I struggle with the same thing, but I've found it helpful to re-frame it as a pointless struggle.
Was walking with a friend, discussing this exact same dilemma and we made the point that simply over the course of our two hour walk together there was probably enough NEW & GREAT content produced in that short time to keep us engaged for years!
At any point all we are doing is dipping a thimble in the ocean.
I'm trying to forget completely about the list of what I'm missing and simply enjoy what I'm reading and being grateful for the time I get to read.
No matter how brilliant one is, there is NO chance to get on top of even a tiny fraction of all the great things to read, watch, listen to etc..
It's a pointless pursuit that's doomed to failure.
Revel in the reading and forget about the unread.
As to priorities, I'm drawn to choosing what I think I'll enjoy the most, do enough of that and the rest usually takes care of itself.
Easier said than done I know !
I struggled with this too but the key thing remember is that when you are overwhelmed the easiest thing to do is to give up. Thats one thing you must not do. Some of the options
1) prioritise - Chose the news feeds you like and make sure you atleast read all of them
2) Listen if you cant read - i have started using podcasts, audible and other audio tools to replace reading. Listen when walking or doing mundane tasks that dont need you to focus.
3) replace noise with matter - some newsletters sound enticing but are a time suck. Focus on what matters
4) some times its good to save for later. If you have to get other things done bookmark important things for later. You dont always need to read it now... later is as good
5) cut wasteful social media like insta and FB from your phone. They are like a spiral vortex. Sometimes they just suck time away without adding any value. Mindless peering at other peoples activities is a waste.
Hope this helps
Monik
Given the pace at which information is generated today, it is perfectly normal to feel over-whelmed about it. The fear of missing out on something interesting/informative to read will always remain at the back of the head.
As investors there is a similar feeling we face when it comes our portfolios. We invest knowing very well that we will commit an error of omission. The universe of investible assets is far larger than what can fit into our portfolio. We thus accept that errors of omission will be far more common than errors of commission. Similarly, with reading, we need to accept that we cannot read it all.
This issue of not being able to read it all is not new, though. Concepts like anti-library (https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/) and Tsundoku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) are proof that people have always had more information available than they can consume. We should therefore not worry about not being able to read everything.
There are other marginal ideas that can help as well:
-> Time-management: Making time to read more is a subject that is widely discussed. I have nothing new to add to it. For anyone that is unfamiliar, Seneca's 'On the Shortness of Time' is the best place to start. Some of the comments above are also helpful.
-> Prioritisation: Clearly, when there is so much to read, we need to prioritise on what to read. More importantly, we need to give up reading anything that we think is not adding value. In this respect, be like the child who quickly moves from one toy to another as soon as he gets bored (although there may be some topics that may require you to endure - more the exceptions than norms).
-> Objective Based Learning: Another form of prioritisation is reading deliberately to find answers to questions that you have. This can help you skim through a lot of material as you know exactly what you are looking for. This is in contrast to the general reading that we do which is more exploratory in nature.
-> Read It Later Apps: Apps like Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket, Notion etc that let you save articles can be very helpful. If I come across something that seems interesting but I cant manage to read at the moment, I add it my Evernote library. I try and tag the article while adding. In this way, even if I cant get to reading the whole article later (Evernote is also an anti-library for me), I can still find it when I am thinking/writing about a particular topic. Taking the few extra seconds to tag that article is a high-leverage (high return on time invested) activity for me.
-> Outsourcing: This is something that I discovered only a week or so back on twitter (https://twitter.com/DaveCBeck/status/1407019257217654784?s=20). I haven't tried it yet, but seems like an interesting way to learn something on the side (not a core project). This is more helpful in widening your interests rather than deepening your understanding.
I saw all the above are marginal ideas as they will help in making 5-10-15% improvements but not more. The most helpful is going to be the acceptance that you cannot read it all. Be comfortable in having a large anti-library. I usually have over 100 tabs open in my phone browser of half read articles. This is in addition to 1000s of un-read emails that I have of the various publications that I subscribe. Not to mention the barrage of research notes that are published each day. There is no way I can go through it all. I have put in place some systems to be a little efficient, but like I said, there are all marginal ideas.
I hope that helps.
Here's some additional perspective from Issue 11:
In the time that will take you to read this sentence, 10,000 new tweets will appear on Twitter. If this pace of information broadcast overwhelms you, then this article (https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/01/27/info-overload-fake/) will provide an interesting perspective to you: Information overload is not as big a problem as we seem to feel it is.