You don’t have to envy those who read a lot or read fast.
Just like you don’t have to be jealous of your friends who can run a half or even a full marathon, because they all started with short distance training and then gradually became so strong and graceful.
It’s because they all started with short distance practice and then gradually became so sassy and powerful.
It’s the same with reading, too. All those gods who are fast at writing and reviewing books started with a basic exercise.
What is this basic exercise?
This is the “one book a week” training we are going to talk about today. 1.
1) Why should we start with a book a week?
(1) Developing the habit of reading
A book a week is a simple habit formation program for people who don’t yet have a reading habit.
While you’re trying this habit formation, try not to let reading take up too much time in your life.
As busy as you are, if you can squeeze in a tomato clock (25 minutes) a day, that’s all you need.
Because even if you read a book from beginning to end, you can still finish a book in 25 minutes a day for 7 days (as evidenced by the data in Part 2 of this article).
(2) Incorporate a Routine into Your Life
You can try reading early in the morning, or you can try reading before bed, or you can even try listening to a book on the go with an app.
Try to incorporate reading into your life and make it a ritual habit.
Just like we have to brush our teeth early in the morning and will brush our phones before bed, make it a habit.
This way, it won’t feel deliberate and reading won’t feel like an extra effort.
(3) Record data to motivate yourself
For each day’s reading, try keeping track of your reading status.
Is there an interruption in the tomato clock?
How many pages of a tomato clock have you read?
How many tomatoes did you read today?
These records, like the points and medal rewards we receive when playing games, are a kind of **immediate feedback, and this feedback allows us to see our efforts and changes, making us more positive.
(4) Cumulative reading experience to become a master reader
Aim to read one book a week, starting with simple, easy-to-read books whenever possible.
Try it for a week, and if you can keep trying, the more you read, the easier it will be to see the results.
Just like when we start practicing the 1500m sprint, we will gradually build up our running experience and work toward running the marathon. 2.
2) How can we read a book a week?
(1) Limiting the Scope of the Letter
Hao Mingyi’s The More Reader divides reading into four types of “diets”.
Categories of Reading
So we limited the scope of the book a week to “staple reading” like.
A book designed to reinforce what you already know.
Methodology/industry experience book
Self-inspired, potential-boosting books
If you are challenged with a book in a completely new field, or if you are reading a heavy book, it may take a lot of your time and energy.
So focus on general skills such as time management, reading skills, communication skills that we all use in our daily work, and you have some basic knowledge so that when you enter the study area for reading training, you can train both your reading skills and your basic skills.
Focus on General Skills – Access the Learning Zone
It’s like when you do physical training and you’re asked to run a half marathon right off the bat. So when we start practicing, we need to choose books that are less difficult and easier on ourselves.
(2) Time Limits
We think we don’t have time to read, but we don’t set a time limit when we do.
Like a task, if we read “whenever you want,” we will never finish, because if we are not aware of the time constraint, it will be difficult to develop our reading potential.
What is the appropriate time limit?
Basically, you just have to limit yourself to 25 minutes per reading. You can use an app like Tomato Clock to stay focused for 25 minutes every time you start reading.
Twenty-five minutes is the maximum time limit many of us have to stay focused, and we train ourselves with that limit in the beginning.
So 25 minutes of uninterrupted tomato clock time, 7 days a week, is more than enough time to read a business-oriented book in 3.5 hours.
For example, in the picture below you can see the Reading Boot Camp-anna’s reading habit development record, which is a book that can be read in 5-7 tomato clocks, at a pace that is completely inapplicable to the reading method, from beginning to end. (Each small square represents a tomato clock)
Reading Camp – Ana’s Reading Habit Development Record
(3) Review of Reading
The habit of many youngsters in reading is to pick up and start from the first page.
When you go to an amusement park, do you buy your ticket through the gate and then just walk down the street? If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to walk around all day.
So we’ll check the map and choose what we’re just interested in playing, right?
We need to do the same with reading, we need to quickly look at the map and guide of the book, and we need to know the general structure of the book to know how we should read it.
So in How to Read a Book, review reading is one of the steps we must take in order to read.
Front Cover
Foreword & Preface
Catalogs
Epilogue
By quickly establishing a cognitive structure for a book, you can essentially determine if the book is right for you or not.
In multiple offline experiences, 15 minutes is more than enough time for this process.
(4) Scanned reading
After the review reading, you can spend another 15 minutes doing a quick scan of the book.
The point of this stage is to quickly turn each page of the book, staying on each page for just a few seconds.
This process is a bit like quickly flipping through a dictionary. If you just flip through the pages without a purpose, of course, it doesn’t help, but once you have a purpose, you get the “color bath” effect.
For example, if you go out thinking, “How many red things am I going to see today? When you walk down the street, you see that “the world is full of red things”: red posters, red cars… —. It’s not that the world is suddenly full of red things, it’s just that you become aware of them and they naturally come to you.
For example, if you buy a Toyota, you will see that the world is full of Toyota cars.
Use the color bath effect to give yourself hints about your goals. When you do a quick preview of a book, you’ll be able to find key words and sentences that interest you on every page of the quick flip.
All you have to do is make random marks (underline, draw arrows, highlight with a highlighter), or just bend the page.
The time you spend on each page is 5-10 seconds, so a 200+ page book can be done in as little as 10 minutes at this stage.
(5) Skip reading
After two steps, review reading and scanning, you basically have an idea of the content and structure of a book.
You can also decide which ones interest you and which ones you want to spend time reading.
The essence of reading is a kind of learning, and learning means focusing on what you want to get value from in the moment.
You’ve already figured out what’s valuable to you through review reading and quick previews. All that is left is the process of looking for answers in the corresponding chapters.
Basically, a book’s key content is only 20% of the total content, and mastering 80% of the key content is enough, which means that for a book of 200 pages, there are only 32 worth reading. 
The skipping process is also done in one tomato hour of reading time each day.
(6) Applying what you have learned
Since the sections you skipped are of interest to you, what use are they to you?
Can this content change your behavior and approach?
Can you apply it to your own work and life?
How can we apply the contents of the book to our work and life?
Here’s where RIA’s note reading method comes in.
Image from “That’s Enough to Read
I enables us to reassemble the content of the fragment with our own statements.
A1 Write down whether I have ever been in a situation like the one described in the fragment, or whether I have been around a
A2 is especially important because, in combination with the methods in the clip, we need to refine for ourselves the next action steps, i.e., what I will do next.
For example, after watching the snippet of the daily list in The Illustrated Tomato Workbook, I’m going to write down the daily list I’m going to make for myself starting today.
Trying to apply the methods from the book to our lives is the ultimate in workplace reading.
For your daily reading of one book a week, try writing an RIA note or two for the snippets of your skip.
What, can’t write? Then think of this one as a brutal display of a clip that will be of no use to you at all.
3. summary.
It makes no sense at all to focus on speed in reading, and there is not much value in discussing whether reading should be fast or not.
Because reading in the workplace is concerned with costs and benefits, what is the use of focusing only on speed and quantity?
For example, if a book takes you only an hour or two to read, you read 20% of the parts using the 80/20 rule.
The way you read a book and the way you read a book from the first page to the last page in an hour or two at a speed of 1600 per minute – these two ways of reading are different concepts.
The latter is actually still at the very basic level of reading, i.e., identifying words and phrases in a book, whereas the method we’re talking about today is sifting through the key points and applying them efficiently.
So the one-book-a-week training does not mean that you have to flip through a book a week, but rather, “get into the habit of reading every day and gain more knowledge with less time.
Mr. Li Xiaolai has a public name: “study study study study study again”, the first “study” is a verb, the second “study” is a noun.
If you want to learn how to read and read again, and master the method of reading to make your self-improvement faster and more efficient, then start practicing with a book a week.
Thank you for reading, I hope it helps you.
END
Recent Comments