11–20 of 62 posts
I can recommend "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Made me realize how distracted I am, and how much can be gained by focusing on "deep" work. A quick read, but describes the problem and coping-strategies well.
I think that if there were a clear outline at the beginning of articles, essays or blog posts like this I might waste less time trying to skim them for the point. I didn't read nearly enough of it to find the author's point but personally I've started skipping over content that doesn't present clear goals up front. If I want suspense, mystery and surprise endings I read fiction. I would think that "Deep Reading" isn'…
Well, we're drowning in a sea of nearly identical articles about information overload, at least. It's time we had some novel contributions to the genre: this is not one.
"we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing. I feel this market failure keenly each day when I recommend a fine piece of writing that deserves to be read for years to come and yet will have at most two days in the sun.
You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that record because it was released last year,” or, “I’m not going to watch that film because it came out last month.” Why are we so much less interested in journalism that’s a month or a year old?"
------
Hacker sidenote: surely there's a market for an app that combines your read-later lists, a gentle timer like that in the headspace meditation app, and duolingo-like gamification.
Someone ought to build it.
I can recommend "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Made me realize how distracted I am, and how much can be gained by focusing on "deep" work. A quick read, but describes the problem and coping-strategies well.
Got that book a month back but had no time to deep read it yet due to various distractions every day. It appears to be a great book.
I've also found helpful to use task systems that impose a hard limit on current work. I use a simple kanban table in org-mode and it works great to get me doing important stuff.
One of the best articles I've read on this topic is here: https://next.ft.com/content/009050e4-75ea-11e2-9891-00144fea... "we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing. I feel this market failure keenly each day when I recommend a fine piece of writing that deserves to be read for years to come and yet will have at most two days in the sun. You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going t…
All of my regular distractions are in the block list, and if/when I get frustrated with myself, I turn the app on and voila - 12 hours of inaccessibility. This limits my infotainment to an hour at day at most.
(Of course, there is always the phone, but I find it easier to not get lost in it. There's also an app called "forest" which gameifies not opening the phone, which I turn on if I know the meeting I'm going into is dull.)
I think that if there were a clear outline at the beginning of articles, essays or blog posts like this I might waste less time trying to skim them for the point. I didn't read nearly enough of it to find the author's point but personally I've started skipping over content that doesn't present clear goals up front. If I want suspense, mystery and surprise endings I read fiction. I would think that "Deep Reading" isn'…
This way you could ramp up at each stage and decide if it's valuable to keep reading.
I can recommend "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Made me realize how distracted I am, and how much can be gained by focusing on "deep" work. A quick read, but describes the problem and coping-strategies well.
Got that book a month back but had no time to deep read it yet due to various distractions every day. It appears to be a great book.
The one you guys are talking about: https://sivers.org/book/DeepWork
Meta: something I found interesting about Derek is that he welcomes mail from anyone: "Please email me at [...] for any reason. I reply to all, and much prefer email over social networks. "
I think that if there were a clear outline at the beginning of articles, essays or blog posts like this I might waste less time trying to skim them for the point. I didn't read nearly enough of it to find the author's point but personally I've started skipping over content that doesn't present clear goals up front. If I want suspense, mystery and surprise endings I read fiction. I would think that "Deep Reading" isn'…
I would love to see a writing format with something like the following structure: 1) A TLDR of Twitter length 2) A paraphrase of the key concepts and point argued in the article 3) The actual full-length article This way you could ramp up at each stage and decide if it's valuable to keep reading.
I actually agree with your list; I think the inverted pyramid is really about prose construction in an age where print space was at a premium. We can be a lot more free with formatting or redundant information (if it is clearly marked as such) on the web.
I mostly wanted to point out that the concept is not new, but as far as I can tell, it has been pretty much forgotten in most modern web journalism.