

Discipline for my Information Diet - MikeCapone
http://michaelgr.com/2009/06/14/discipline-for-my-information-diet/

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antiform
A good way for me to maintain motivation when slogging through information-
dense nonfiction books (like textbooks, programming language manuals) is to
read through actively (writing notes/questions in margins or post-its) and
then to quickly "generate" something from what I just learned. For instance,
if I am reading a math textbook, I will play with the theorems, adding and
subtracting conditions and generating counterexamples, and then do all the
problems and TeX them up. If I am reading a philosophy book, I will summarize
the accounts of the section and then argue my own perspective, essentially
writing a brief philosophy paper. If I am reading something that I tend to
mostly disagree with, like GEB, I will even try and write a "devil's advocate"
paper, where I try suspend by disbelief and figure out why the particular
perspective has appeal by arguing against myself.

In the short run, this may mean that you take a lot more time to finish books,
but it has drastically improved my ability to recall what I have learned and
my ability to not abandon the process after I hit a wall. This not only
because you are immediately reinforcing what you have just learned, but I've
found that if I see the fruit of my labors, even if it's just a steadily
growing PDF on my desktop or a short, elegant program in my home directory, it
provides just enough to motivation to finish the next chapter, and the next
chapter, until you're finally done.

~~~
Hexstream
I'm afraid I'm not motivated enough to use your motivational tricks. Circular
dependency!

~~~
MikeCapone
Maybe there's an easier trick that you can use to get started and bootstrap
the process?

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whatusername
<http://xkcd.com/597/>

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c00p3r
Switch between tasks. 45-60 minutes is enough.

