March 24th, 2008 - Reading work-related books

This month’s Escape Adulthood podcast has a valuable, work-related tip–how to simplifying reading work-related books. Kim and Jason interview Jason and Jodi Womack, a husband and wife team who help people manage time and increase personal productivity. If you don’t want to listen to the whole episode (and do–there are many others tips about work/life balance), it’s around minute 26. In brief, Jason W. says to read the book four times. Four times? Surely that’s more work than just once! Nope:

  1. Read the table of contents and the appendix/index. [I don’t think the appendix is correct, but that’s what he said. Usually an appendix gives data or more details about a specific part of the book so it’s all that valuable for an overview.] The point is to get a general overview of the point of the book.
  2. Read everything in bold–chapter titles, subtitles, call-outs, etc. (Although in some of the lousier business books, this is almost the entire book. I really hate those books. They are oh so lame but become oh so popular.)
  3. Read the first line of each paragraph.
  4. Read only those sections that really interest you.

I think it’s a downfall of mine that I rarely read any books about online teaching. I just can’t stand to do it. After 10 years in the field, I know it pretty well. Each new tool that comes out–sure, the technical aspects are different, but the instructional design methodology is still the same. But it means I rarely get new ideas and I can never quote anyone or recognize names in the field. But I think I could stand to read books with this method. I skip the boring parts! I find the interesting parts, and I can modify the process and read an entire paragraph if I want to.

And he’s right. I picked up some books Friday afternoon and started reading one today. In the middle of reading the TOC, I flipped to a particular section. The first sentence gave me the info I wanted (optimal size for an online discussion group: 4-5 students). The rest of the paragraph was fluff I didn’t need.

So, will this simplify my life by giving me an easier, faster way to read? Or does it make it more complicated because now I have a dozen books on my shelf that I hope to read in the next 12 weeks?

By the way, he claims you can read a book 3-4x faster this way. I’m not sure you are truly reading the book, however. It’s just skimming. Not that that’s a bad thing. I bet this could help in college reading, too.

At the Womack’s website, I also found an a blog post with a audio of just this tip. And hey–he does say it works for college classes, too. And for how-to books.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 1:29 pm EDT and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Reading work-related books”

  1. Kim of Kim & Jason Says:
    March 25th, 2008 at 11:37 am EDT

    Thanks for sharing Jason’s great tip! It really opens the door to so much great content! I’m glad you enjoyed the interview as much as we did!!

    Happy reading!!

  2. Jason Womack Says:
    March 25th, 2008 at 11:39 am EDT

    Hello there! I love the name of your blog: “simple living…” what a concept!

    If I turn it around, I get “Living Simply.” Hmmm, now THERE is something to think about on a long walk.

    At any rate, I’ve been reading books like this (the business or how-to books) for years, and I continue to marvel at the feeling of leaving a bookstore knowing more about what people like:

    Gitomer
    Covey
    Peters
    and so on

    have to say. For anyone reading this, don’t believe either one of us…just go give it a try!

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