You've Probably Read Enough

And yet here I am, not stopping.

I probably have some ulterior motive for reading, rather than really doing it in order to be qualified for that startup idea I have.

But I won't know that until the next article gets upvoted that tells me my mental state in one sentence!

When I want to jump into a new interest, I usually spend a chunk of time at the beginning watching videos or grazing thru a manual.

Even if I don't "get" everything yet -- knowing that Final Cut can do "X, Y, Z" and it's somewhere in the middle of the manual -- can be useful in removing some of the early frustration in the learning process.

Though the time I spend here on HN is both enjoyable and educational, a few months ago I ran an interesting test. For each article I read, I wrote down a one line entry on a piece of paper noting the site and basic gist of the article. The next day, before I was "allowed" to read any more articles on HN, I sat down with the blank side of said piece of paper from yesterday, and wrote down the articles I remembered.

I hate to admit it, but my retention rate was just miserable, probably less than 50%. Sure, remembering stuff "cold" on the next day is different than remembering an association during a conversation (e.g. "Ya, I read something about 'X' the other day."), but it was enough to make me wonder if my educational entertainment reading was time well spent, or time wasted?

Everyone needs breaks, and it's fun to keep up with what's going on in the world, but I might be better off doing something else...

At a certain point, it's no longer reading to gain more knowledge, it's about procrastination.

Doing takes work, it requires making decisions, it requires critical thinking. Reading helps you delay this with an activity you can justify to yourself as being helpful in the long run.

However at a certain point, you've delayed too long and the time investment you've sunk into reading has been way too much for what you're getting out of it, compared to the act of doing and producing something and/or learning from experience.

(Edit: spacing)

It depends strongly on the subject, I find. Sometimes this advice is right; sometimes it's very far off. I've made both mistakes, and it's hard to predict which is which. Sometimes you read forever when you should've just done something months ago. But other times you waste a lot of time badly reinventing a wheel and getting saddled with bad design decisions that should've been avoidable, because you didn't realize that what you were trying to do already had a name and a lot of smart things written about it (or realized but didn't want to read them). You might call that the "just get down to business and parse HTML with a regex" school of getting-things-done, to take an extreme but common example that might've benefitted from more reading. ;-) A lot of bad statistics are also in that category...

I think the 2nd mistake might actually be more common, given the amount of wheel-reinventing (and not always reinventing well) that goes on, but it's hard to say.