Once a prioritization system is set up, it’s then trivial to decide whether to read the top book or do something else based on how your estimate of the value of doing so compares to your alternative activities. Without a prioritization system, it doesn’t matter whether you have fixed an amount of time or not—there are vastly more books to read than anyone has time in 8,760 hours per year, so you must prioritize.
So prioritization gets you flexible reading time, flexible reading time doesn’t get you prioritization, so I don’t see how pointing it out is relevant. Prioritization is an independent need. Please explain.
More generally, you seem to be assuming that one can instantly evaluate, without conscious prioritization, what the optimal activity is at any given time. I know that is not even slightly true for me, and I highly doubt it is true for you.
My point was that questions like “What is the goal of reading?” don’t really arise when optimizing generally, only when optimizing reading.
If I want to improve my performance at some task and reading is the best way to do it then so be it, but its not clear why I would be comparing the benefits of “reading to improve at foo” to the benefits of “reading to make conversation” in particular rather than the benefits of exercise (say).
When I read now it is normally because I have some pressing reason to read a particular book. The things I read (which are typically either very technical or descriptions/analysis of some event or person I am curious about) would not be turned up by trying to prioritize among books.
I do agree that prioritizing books is a useful activity if you spend much time reading, and that thinking about optimization—however you want to slice it up—is generally a good idea. I like your post. I was just offering an observation which I have found helpful (and which has caused me not to spend much time either reading or thinking about which books to read).
I see, that makes sense. I find it easiest to prioritize within a domain like “books”, vs. among all possible skill-increasing activities. Also, when it comes to “generally increasing my knowledge / improving my map”, that is something that I think it makes sense to allocate a fixed bucket of time to, although one should also compare alternatives like documentaries, blogs, and conversations as ways of doing it.
Once a prioritization system is set up, it’s then trivial to decide whether to read the top book or do something else based on how your estimate of the value of doing so compares to your alternative activities. Without a prioritization system, it doesn’t matter whether you have fixed an amount of time or not—there are vastly more books to read than anyone has time in 8,760 hours per year, so you must prioritize.
So prioritization gets you flexible reading time, flexible reading time doesn’t get you prioritization, so I don’t see how pointing it out is relevant. Prioritization is an independent need. Please explain.
More generally, you seem to be assuming that one can instantly evaluate, without conscious prioritization, what the optimal activity is at any given time. I know that is not even slightly true for me, and I highly doubt it is true for you.
My point was that questions like “What is the goal of reading?” don’t really arise when optimizing generally, only when optimizing reading.
If I want to improve my performance at some task and reading is the best way to do it then so be it, but its not clear why I would be comparing the benefits of “reading to improve at foo” to the benefits of “reading to make conversation” in particular rather than the benefits of exercise (say).
When I read now it is normally because I have some pressing reason to read a particular book. The things I read (which are typically either very technical or descriptions/analysis of some event or person I am curious about) would not be turned up by trying to prioritize among books.
I do agree that prioritizing books is a useful activity if you spend much time reading, and that thinking about optimization—however you want to slice it up—is generally a good idea. I like your post. I was just offering an observation which I have found helpful (and which has caused me not to spend much time either reading or thinking about which books to read).
I see, that makes sense. I find it easiest to prioritize within a domain like “books”, vs. among all possible skill-increasing activities. Also, when it comes to “generally increasing my knowledge / improving my map”, that is something that I think it makes sense to allocate a fixed bucket of time to, although one should also compare alternatives like documentaries, blogs, and conversations as ways of doing it.