Very exciting post! Honestly, I was afraid that you were going to define “worthwhile” purely in terms of insights, which would have been very limited in my opinion. But you didn’t!
Concerning your system, I’m wondering if I want to use it. I do notice that when tired or feeling shitty, I can decide not to read even if reading is the really important thing to do at that time for my mood. But instead of reading crappy articles, I generally watch crappy youtube videos.
My current approach is to have enough cool books that I want to read at hand for any mood, which is a bit different from your.
So I have two questions:
Are you sometime not in the mood for the specific random choice? Like not wanting to read existential horror, and you sample a Lovecraft short story? And when that happened, did forcing yourself to read it changed your mind and/or mood?
How does your system work for things that take more than one sitting to read? Like if you sample a novel, do you keep reading it until you’re finished with it, or do you put it back in the list after the current reading session? The second seems stupid, but the first might be an issue for me, as I sometimes want to change what I read a bit in the middle of some book.
Thank you for the positive review and good questions (and please forgive the lateness of this reply).
In reply:
there are certainly times where I am not in the mood for a specific random choice. When that happens, I allow myself one more random selection. Because I have set the sublists for maximal variety (i.e. There is only one “cosmic horror story” category) the next selection usually is something I find compelling and interesting enough to complete.
In the rare case where the second selection is still not interesting, I try to reflect on why, and ask myself whether what I want is actually a different kind of break or distraction—watching a short video, listening to music or a podcast, going for a walk, talking with a friend.
I am uncertain of how it would work for longer works. If a short story is quite long, such as a novella, I will keep reading it at each reading break until I finish it. I do use the technique for picking novels to read though and have found it useful for that. For novels, I have a set time each day—the hour before I go to bed—that I use exclusively for reading novels.
Very exciting post! Honestly, I was afraid that you were going to define “worthwhile” purely in terms of insights, which would have been very limited in my opinion. But you didn’t!
Concerning your system, I’m wondering if I want to use it. I do notice that when tired or feeling shitty, I can decide not to read even if reading is the really important thing to do at that time for my mood. But instead of reading crappy articles, I generally watch crappy youtube videos.
My current approach is to have enough cool books that I want to read at hand for any mood, which is a bit different from your.
So I have two questions:
Are you sometime not in the mood for the specific random choice? Like not wanting to read existential horror, and you sample a Lovecraft short story? And when that happened, did forcing yourself to read it changed your mind and/or mood?
How does your system work for things that take more than one sitting to read? Like if you sample a novel, do you keep reading it until you’re finished with it, or do you put it back in the list after the current reading session? The second seems stupid, but the first might be an issue for me, as I sometimes want to change what I read a bit in the middle of some book.
Thank you for the positive review and good questions (and please forgive the lateness of this reply).
In reply:
there are certainly times where I am not in the mood for a specific random choice. When that happens, I allow myself one more random selection. Because I have set the sublists for maximal variety (i.e. There is only one “cosmic horror story” category) the next selection usually is something I find compelling and interesting enough to complete.
In the rare case where the second selection is still not interesting, I try to reflect on why, and ask myself whether what I want is actually a different kind of break or distraction—watching a short video, listening to music or a podcast, going for a walk, talking with a friend.
I am uncertain of how it would work for longer works. If a short story is quite long, such as a novella, I will keep reading it at each reading break until I finish it. I do use the technique for picking novels to read though and have found it useful for that. For novels, I have a set time each day—the hour before I go to bed—that I use exclusively for reading novels.