FAST reading: how I fly through a book every week
New year, new habits.
Trying reading?
It's never too late; until a year ago, one of the few books I had finished was The Giver. As of early 2023, I've run through 40 novels; spanning classic literature, modern fiction, non-fiction, and psychology. Oh, I also run this website.
Three things changed my approach: a product, service, and habit.
Amazon Kindle📱
In physics, friction represents the resistance imposed on an object stuck between two surfaces.
Similarly, friction in habits represents the cognitive barrier of moving between two tasks: driving to the gym, finding ingredients for cooking, or walking downstairs to do laundry. Friction is all the tiny details/efforts that cause us to second-guess a behavior. Reading is full of this.
A few things off the top of my head…
Find a book to read.
Drive to the store (hope it's in stock) and buy it.
Either only read at home, or be forced to carry it around in a bag.
Oh, and only with decent lighting can you start.
A Kindle simplifies all this friction; browse the store to pay and start reading any book, carry around an endless virtual library with a tablet thinner than your iPhone, enjoy a distraction-free experience, and in any lighting as it has a backlight.
These conveniences will let you morph books into any part of your day. In my schedule, I read every night before bed; replacing my last hour awake with a kindle instead of my phone. I've drastically increased my pages and sleeping hours per week.
“Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long run.” -James Clear, Atomic Habits
A Kindle isn't improving friction by 1%; in my experience, it turned me from a non-reader into an online book reviewer.
Audible🎧
This service will easily double your reading hours; all you have to do is take advantage of habit stacking.
“One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits
Say you commute to work one hour every day. Over the span of a workweek (5 days), you can accumulate 5 hours of reading by just listening to an audiobook; this is time that otherwise would have been spent mindlessly driving/cycling/sitting. Most books are 10 hours, so by simply going to work you could be running through a novel every 2 weeks.
And honestly, audiobooks can be stacked onto any mindless chore in life; got an hour of traffic? A pile of dirty laundry to take care of? Bored at the gym? No problem, turn up Harry Potter and let your mind wander.
This also creates the effect where you look forward to long drives, workouts, and even cleaning; for me, it was transforming.
Don't just read, engage✍️
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen
If you are doing steps 1 and 2 above, you are probably engaging with tons of new literature every month.
With mass consumption though, comes a sort of information overload. It becomes easy to forget what you read and move on to the next story. I know this happened to me in the early days.
If you want to span through endless novels only to remember a quarter of them, be my guest. It’s certainly easy to say you “read" 100 books last year”, yet only recall the names of 20.
But if you're interested in retaining a majority of what you read and be able to apply it in life, I have a simple remedy: engage with books.
In school, we store and refine information by taking exams. But in this system, all you have to do is create something or discuss what you read.
Here are some simple ways to engage
Join a book club
Write short summaries
Create book notes
Actively engaging with your opinions or lessons from a book allows your brain to refine the key ideas to keep; storing them in long-term memory.
Obviously, there are levels to this. If you want to simply remember a few key details, write a three-sentence summary of the novel. It sounds like a time waster, but believe me, this is more powerful than you think; the mind only needs a few moments of reflection to store information, and writing is often the best method.
But say you run across a life-changing book that is filled with useful knowledge; in that case, write notes. Highlight important bits and pieces, and then try to rephrase all the key points as if you were teaching it to a stranger. Basically, create your own cliff notes. If you want a good example of this check out my own summaries on this website.
I’ll warn you though, this method is very time-consuming, but it will essentially burn the book into your brain's flash drive. So only do this for the really worthy ones.
My system summarized:
Kindle + Audiobooks + Engagement = highly effective reading habit.
Try it out. This style of reading definitely lets me live a normal life while still being well-read.
And who knows, you may love this stuff so much that you end up writing online.
