The RestartGTD guide to reading

Source: The Economist.com

Late addition!!!

Thanks to a reader comment, my memory was jogged and I remembered a GREAT article on the future of the book by Raymond Kurzweil in Library Journal January 1992.  The article is about technology life cycles (Precursor, Invention, Development, Maturity, False Pretenders, and Obsolescence, highly recommended!), but it illustrates technology phases using books.   There are three articles in the series, you can find the other two from the above article.

Introduction

“Ohhhhhhh, I get  it!  … I read therefore I am.” That is what my UM-St. Louis student Jim (how would you like some kook-aid) Jones said as he walked into my office for the first time.  I am a reader: a voracious and omnivorous reader.   My three sons are readers (all three finished the Hobbit and Trilogy as eight year olds). So, I think it is in the genes.

I have always loved books.  As an undergraduate I made a decision that my office decor would always be made up of books and book shelves.  For thirty five years of adult life, I have read and read and read.  I believe reading will continue while I have any cognitive functions intact.  However …

Books now look like clutter to me.  :-(

The floor plan of my 14′ x 12′ office is simple.  Clear desk at the west end of the room.  And bookshelves along all the other sides.  So, I’m now shadowed by three walls of … it pains me to say … clutter.

This post is part one of the RestartGTD approach to reading.

How I am reading today?

Here is the story.

The short answer is: Kindle.  No not the Kindle device.  Kindle for Mac.

When I landed the job teaching at Concordia University – Portland in 2010, I bought and iPad and a Kindle DX (2nd generation).  I figured that by January of 2011 that most of the faculty and students would be using Kindle to read text books and pretty much everything else.

Wrong.

When I arrived, I was surprised to see that students, though they use texting for interacting with all their friends, loved email.  This was a pleasant surprise because email is my Milieu, my most preferred form of communication.  But, it was a negative omen for iPads and Kindle devices.

Students loved email, but 1 in the first year of my teaching, had an iPad.  Ninety percent of students have either an Android smart phone, or an iPhone.  Very few have a Nook or a Kindle.  Those who had these devices were using them only for reading with their eyes.  The best thing about a Kindle device for me was being able to listen to books being read while commuting.  So, if you have a Kindle device, google how to make it talk to you.

So, here I sit broken hearted …

Not to worry!  Having a Kindle DX and an iPad with the Kindle software, was a stepping stone.  I initially would read on the DX.  This was great, buying a book took a minute.  I was able to highlight, bookmark, and annotate as I read (by the way I dog ear, write in, stick post-its, etc., in books as I process them).  The DX is light, it read to me (90% of books seem to have text-to-speech enabled), the built in dictionary was FANTASTIC for my vocabulary (*Aside* If you know an English as a second language person, or you are learning a foreign language, the dictionary function cuts lookup time by a factor of 10).  Nice.

However, once I had tasted the iPad Kindle app, I could not stand how slow the DX was.  So, I moved my reading to Kindle on the iPad.  This allowed all the same benefits except the iPad does not do text-to-speech (*Note* the Kindle Fire also does not do text to speech).  But the sensitivity of the iPad screen was all wrong for highlighting.  And, this point I was hooked on highlighting, because the Kindle software allows you to view just the highlighted parts of a book, so highlighting speeds up re-finding key passages.

But, just for grins, I tasted the Kindle app for Mac.  (Note: You can get Kindle for your PC or Mac by going to http://www.amazon.com/kindleforpc or http://www.kindleformac.com.) Once I started reading via Kindle on my 11″ Macbook Air (MBA) I could no longer stand the slowness of the iPad or the difficulty in selecting text for highlighting on the iPad.  So, how I read books today, has shifted entirely over to my 2.1 pound 11″ MBA.  I now have 174 Kindle books on the MBA and mercifully, it does not weigh an ounce more than when I bought it!

But … but … what about non-book reading?

Interesting you should ask!  My non-book reading is shifting over to … wait for it … wait for it …. Evernote.  Huh?  How can Evernote be a reading app?

Simple I will show you:

 Source: Google Chrome Web Browser on my school office iMac 24″

 While I do have a subscription to the tree-killing Economist magazine.  I actually read the Economist via Evernote.  I web surf to the Economist web site, then read.  When I find an article that I think I may ever refer to again in a conversation or project, I click on either the elephant icon (a.k.a. Evernote web clipper that I wrote about recently), or on the Luxo Lamp icon (a.k.a. Evernote Clearly).

What is Evernote Web Clipper?

Allows me to select text and then clip it to Evernote for later reading.  See previous post here and Evernote’s web clipper page for details.

What is Evernote Clearly?

Let me explain with an example.  Go to PCMAG.com and click on the cover GPS article and this is what you will see:

Clutter anyone?  If you click on the Evernote Clearly (Luxo Lamp) icon while looking at this page, this is what you will see:

Evernote Clearly is like personal digital video recorders that strip out commercials.   Clearly allows you to see and/or cut to the meat of interesting web pages, leaving out Flash animations, advertising, and gratuitous cross linking.

So, once you clear the article of clutter, you read it in your browser, and if you don’t have time to finish, or if you know you’ll want to refer back to this article and web page, you clip the article to your Evernote reference filing system.

I read in Evernote more and more each week as my short term memory is shifting from creating book marks to the good stuff, to clipping and forgetting good stuff because I know I’ve got it in Evernote.  But seriously, Evernote Clearly is worth having just to be able to read web pages in peace.

What does any of this have to do with GTD?

GTD is about organizing and re-organizing one’s informational infrastructure in order to liberate the mind and make the biggest dent in this big old world, possible.  Writing is a big part of this org/reorg process.  And consequently, so is reading.  Casting your reading into electronic technology enables you to:

• Have more of your infrastructure with you at any given time.  For example, Bill Jelen’s most excellent Excel 2010 In Depth in Kindle form.  Is on all three of the computers I use along with Excel.
• Use more slices of otherwise wasted time, to read and refresh your mind.
• Travel much lighter.  The days of 50# backpacks in grad school are over.  Now I’ve got my world in the 2.1 pound Macbook Air.
• Increase the naturalness and expressive power of your work.

When I organize I feel God’s pleasure.  Moving my reading to electronic means has allowed me to read much more, find what I’ve read faster, and access to more external pertinent information has increased the creativity and speed with which I accomplish projects.

I suspect that David Allen hates to “back” any technology because technologies come and go.  For me, however, technology is how I do GTD.  Swaping paper for electronic reading has increased the efficacy of my work.

Reading efficiently and effectively, just matters.  :-)

bill meade