Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

untappedbrilliance.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 204 posts

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#81

Post by namelosw »

As an ADHD I just skim through this I see the write down 'The One Thing' part I'm not sure if it will work well, but most of these rituals don't work for me usually.

But what did really work for me:

1. Read the book as soon as I just found it and was interested in it. If it is short I would finish it directly. If it is long I'll eventually fail halfway and it's okay.

2. Top-down reading. Skim through books quickly, multiple rounds, each round goes deeper. In this way, I can stop anytime and still get some insights, instead of stuck in chapter 2 failed and time wasted. I can also always come back later.

3. No additional overheads, no notes, no plan, no to-do lists, or write down 'The One Things'. Try to use the brain instead of tools, tools usually give me leading I hate everything and gave up earlier. Also, practice this way you'll also find brains are better than people perceive them - people used to recite phone numbers.

4. Read when I feel like, at least don't read the same book when I started to struggle - try switch to another book, or else just go out and do anything you want.

In essence: 1) read when you feel like 2) read incrementally so you can stop anytime 3) avoid negative feedback loop

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#82

Post by plumsempy »

yigitcakar wrote: post #48

The article lacked substance but I am glad that we are talking about reading with ADHD here. I don't feel guilty about not finishing books because most of the times if I force myself to finish a book that I don't find interesting enough, I don't remember the information in the book anyway. Over time I have learned to trust my brain, and figured that it will remember the important parts I read. If the book bores me th…

Yes! I have just discovered this recently myself as well: whenever I wander off I context switch to something else I want to do instead of reforcing focus: multiple books, work, anki, side projects. Good so far.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#83

Post by lewispollard »

qart wrote: post #32

For the benefit of people like me, I'm quoting the part of the article that should have been at the top. > 1. Create a Word or Google document to track your books if spreadsheets fill you with fear. > 2. You don’t need to read the whole book. Write down your ONE thing from the part of the book you did read. > 3. Review the document weekly, to keep the ideas fresh in your mind. > 4. If you find that you stopped implem…

Have to say, as someone with reasonably severe inattentive-type ADHD, the hard part of this wouldn't so much be reading the book, but maintaining those documents and reviewing them weekly. The amount of half-finished lists, organisers, documents, etc I have on every cloud, note-taking and todo-list platform available that I never look at again in attempts to organise things like this is too high to count.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#84

Post by nicbou »

I really dislike this sort of blog. Every article feels like it was written for their affiliates and for search engines, and rarely for the readers. It's certainly not written for people with ADHD.

Here's the only useful paragraph in the article:

> This idea came from Megan, a guest on Hal Elrod’s podcast. Megan explained she keeps track of all the books she reads in a spreadsheet. Each time she finishes a book she adds it to her spreadsheet, along with the ONE thing she is going to implement. With each new entry she reviews the list. If she isn’t implementing her ONE thing, she goes back and rereads the book.

Perhaps we read different kinds of books, but I don't see the benefit of this. I read for pleasure, without taking notes or setting objectives. I feel like those would interrupt rather than encourage reading. Good books tend to stay with you either way.

I found that a good book in a good environment is all I really need to read more. It takes 5-10 minutes before my thoughts stop buzzing around and I can focus, but once I'm in that zone, I'm good for a while.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#85

Post by carterschonwald »

nicolas_t wrote: post #78

I have the opposite problem. My problem with ADHD is that if I start a novel and the novel is decent, I will not stop reading until I finish the book or series of book. No matter what work I need to do, I'll even forget to eat and will not go to sleep until I'm either finished or I'm so tired that I need reread the same sentence multiple times before I understand it. It's great in that I've read a lot of books, but i…

I definitely have that completionism of a good novel issue myself.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#86

Post by unfamiliar »

she11c0de wrote: post #24

I don't have ADHD but often find it hard to finish books too. I honestly think that there's a lot of books that are simply not worth reading. Reading a book is quite a commitment (may take up to a month for me). I often lose interest once I realize that whole book is a single idea that could be summed up in a blog post but stretched to fit 300 pages.

Some of those "low density" books are actually about changing your emotional responses or embedding an idea though. Sure you can distill the entire book down to a couple of pages and get the core idea, but your lizard brain isn't going to actually absorb the idea and put it into practice in your life. A lot of the repetition in self-help books in particular is about reinforcing the idea in multiple different contexts and building a proper representation of different behaviour in the reader's mind.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#87

Post by pharke »

she11c0de wrote: post #24

I don't have ADHD but often find it hard to finish books too. I honestly think that there's a lot of books that are simply not worth reading. Reading a book is quite a commitment (may take up to a month for me). I often lose interest once I realize that whole book is a single idea that could be summed up in a blog post but stretched to fit 300 pages.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” -- Francis Bacon

Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book provides a decent framework for dealing with the variety of books out there. There are also tools like Polar[1] that provide an easy way to do incremental reading[2] which may help when attacking a book piece by relevant piece.

[1] https://getpolarized.io/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#88

Post by negrecio »

nicbou wrote: post #84

I really dislike this sort of blog. Every article feels like it was written for their affiliates and for search engines, and rarely for the readers. It's certainly not written for people with ADHD. Here's the only useful paragraph in the article: > This idea came from Megan, a guest on Hal Elrod’s podcast. Megan explained she keeps track of all the books she reads in a spreadsheet. Each time she finishes a book she a…

> Here's the only useful paragraph in the article

Looks like you found the ONE thing in this article.

(jk)

I do agree with you. I read for pleasure and to satisfy curiosity. it's hard (or pointless) to try to find one thing to implement from curiousity driven exploring.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#89

Post by biased_coin »

JackMorgan wrote: post #76
RaceWon wrote: post #65

Pictograph instructions: that's the real SOB of ADHD. Reading novels is not a chore for me, depending. I typically find an author I like and then read the the hell out of his writing. Stephen King short stories are a pretty good place to start imo if you want to get into reading (again), though I started with Vonnegut myself. I am a famous re-reader of books btw. Its like slipping into a comfortable "another world" f…

I believe ADHD people are fully capable of training their minds to become extremely productive. Granted, most people don't want to train anything, much less their minds, so it doesn't manifest much in the wild. But in those that do, it's like a superpower. I spent several years training my hyperfocus to the point where, barring externalities like lack of sleep or food, I can engage it at will. For challenging or crea…

Please share your techniques to train your hyperfocus.

I am currently willing to try anything (except drugs) to help my attention. Pomodoro and meditation have helped me enormously in the past. But now, with kids at home, everything has taken a beating.

Re: How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

#90

Post by petee »

With ADHD readers the focus, I found it funny that it was so long, I had to put the article itself aside to finish later haha (it's not that long)

Personally, I just use audio books now but still collect paper in hopes some day I'll find the time to sit still

Post reply on HN