In the last year, e-books have started taking off in a big way. E-books have been around for a long time, of course, but a few events in the last year suggest that they’re really starting to get traction as a viable alternative to paper-based reading. One is the success of e-books like Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done (read my review). Another is the emergence of e-book-only publishing… » Continue
May 30 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: e-book, internet, reading | 24 comments»
I know you can read. You’re reading this, aren’t you? (If you’re not reading this, never mind.)
But are you productively literate? That is, when you read, do you learn anything that you can apply immediately to your life, or do the words and ideas just bounce around your brain’s pleasure areas for a while before disappearing like so many wisps of morning fog?
Not that there’s anything wrong with… » Continue
May 23 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: book, growth, learning, personal-development, reading | 6 comments»
I just received my copy of Lifehack contributor Pamela Skilling’s new book Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams. Pamela’s book is a guide for people fed up with the corporate lifestyle — the lack of creative expression, the lack of spiritual reward, and ultimately the lack of control over the conditions of your own employment — who are looking… » Continue
May 19 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: book, leadership, learning, Management, organization, Productivity, reading, thinking | 2 comments»
If I were to attempt to project the demographics that make up a typical lifehackista, according to the comments I see here and the roots of the phrase life hacks, I’d say that the average specimen spends a heck of a lot of time reading and writing, online and off, pretty much every single day.
It surely doesn’t apply to everyone who loves lifehacks, but then again, you’re reading this now… » Continue
May 14 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: optimization, reading, rss | 5 comments»
Ades of AdesBlog.com has a theory: that top bloggers don’t read other people’s blogs. To test his theory, he asked several big-name bloggers — Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Yaro Starak — about their blog-reading habits. Except for Darren Rowse, they all said they read few or no blogs; Rowse said he subscribes to 700 but only skims the whole list occasionally… » Continue
April 21 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: blog, Productivity, reading, rss, time-management | 35 comments»
“Reading fiction is a waste of time.”
Have you ever heard someone spout this line of complete and utter bollocks? I’ve rarely heard anything so ridiculous said in my life. Fiction, like all the arts, is an important part of culture; both a reflective distillation of it, and the base elements that form it. Society’s collective attitudes, values, beliefs and the public memory have a symbiotic relationship with the arts.
Books… » Continue
April 12 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: books, creativity, fiction, ideas, problem-solving, reading | 21 comments»
Over 40% of Americans claim not to have read any books in the previous year. The survey was last conducted in 2002, and noted falling reading rates from previous years. I’m sure if you’re reading through lifehack.org that you probably don’t expect reading to stop after you graduate. Yet, with such dismal statistics, how can you beat the odds and read more books this year?
Why Bother… » Continue
January 8 2008 | By Scott H | Tagged: books, improvement, learning, Lifehack, new years resolution, read, reading, speed read, students, studying | 51 comments»
Gideon at Scholastici.us had some advice for students recently, saying that when it comes to scholarly reading, there really is no substitute for hard work, for actually sitting down and reading.Most the time in school what you need to do is very simple:
Sit down with the book, a pen and paper, and perhaps a computer… And from that point, you read. That’s it. You go through and read… » Continue
September 21 2007 | By Dustin | Tagged: academic, college, education, reading, student, studying, university | 20 comments»
When reading non-fiction, the focus is on taking in information. So unlike fiction, where you want to immerse yourself in a story, non-fiction reading techniques can be built on so we’re getting the most out of those books.
Donald Latumahina at LifeOptimizer has some tips to help get the most out of your reading. Some of these you may have heard before [in Efficient Reading], but here Donald puts… » Continue
September 3 2007 | By Craig | Tagged: reading | 5 comments»
The Internet Age allows you to get whatever information you want, as much as you want it. This, however, may do you more harm than good. The reason is simple: there is usually far too much noise in the information we consume. It becomes increasingly difficult to get the gems out of it, and it takes a lot of time and energy to deal with. Besides, increasing noise means… » Continue
August 22 2007 | By Donald | Tagged: effectiveness, information, prioritization, Productivity, reading, tips | 19 comments»
When it comes to reading, lifehacking tends to focus on speed — more words, fewer minutes. That might be fine if reading is understood as a matter of moving information with maximum efficiency from the page to the brain. The faster the connection, so to speak, the better.
But there are other kinds of reading. No one can race through a poem by Emily Dickinson or a short story by… » Continue
August 21 2007 | By Guest | Tagged: reading, school, student | 18 comments»
If you’re anything like me, you probably have a whole stack of books sitting around that you’re really going to read some day. Yeah right!
Sure, it would be nice to get some more reading done, but let’s face it: there is usually something more urgent that needs to get done. And when you have to do all the urgent things, there isn’t much time left over for… » Continue
July 19 2007 | By Brian | Tagged: audio, book, brain, education, learn, leverage, listen, reading | 27 comments»
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somerset Maugham
Somewhere after “lose weight”, “stop procrastinating”, and “fall in love”, “read more” is one of the top goals that many people set for themselves. And rightly so: A good book can be hugely satisfying, can teach you about things beyond your daily horizons, and can create… » Continue
June 25 2007 | By Leo | Tagged: books, habit, reading | 55 comments»
Reading in general is an excellent tool to improve thought, memory and other brainy things; but have you considered reading more of ‘The Classics’?
John Wesley at PickTheBrain argues that more people should delve into those books written by the masters to develop the parts of your brain that might be falling behind in the midst of feedreaders and gossip sites.
5. Historical Perspective
I could argue this point myself, but why… » Continue
June 21 2007 | By Craig | Tagged: brain, mind, reading | 1 comment»
At Lifehack.org How-to Wiki, we have some new content on speed reading. It currently covers the general information, some quick pointers on its techniques, and also myths about speed reading:
3) Speed reading is just skimming the material, you won’t understand it better.
This is dangerous because it is a half-truth. Speed reading is a process for reading everything, whereas skimming is a portion of reading at the upper limits of… » Continue
May 28 2007 | By Leon | Tagged: book, reading, speed-reading | 5 comments»
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