Overall, I found this difficult to read for layout reasons, mostly. The paragraphs and sections are huge, combining multiple ideas and making it hard to identify key points. Your definition of productivity, for example, appears in only one sentence, buried in a short paragraph in the middle of a large section that at first glance appears to be about what productivity isn’t. More subheadings might be helpful, a lot more paragraph breaks definitely would.
Secondly, there are three popular books which I would advise not to read. They are “Eat that Frog”, “7 habits of highly effective people” and “Getting Things Done—the art of stress-free productivity”. I found that all of them are 5% signal and 95% noise and their most important messages could have been summarized on 5 to 10 pages respectively. Ironically, a book that supposedly tells you how to save time inflates its content by out-of-context quotes, analogies that don’t even support their point, personal stories that also don’t support their argument, pseudo-scientific explanations which broadly support their claim, and incredibly lengthy descriptions of ideas that can be entirely described in one short sentence
...if you already understand and agree with them, sure.
The goal of those books is to make an emotional, “near”/concrete-construal argument for their readers to actually implement the ideas proposed, or at the very least come to believe it desirable to implement the ideas. Simply listing off the ideas doesn’t have the same effect, because it doesn’t create an emotional experience or have any of the repetition. Most people remember stories and analogies much more easily, so it’s a better way to prime intuition pumps than simple factual presentation.
(This is why the Sequences are so bloody long, too. In principle, Bayes can be explained with an equation and a few paragraphs. But getting people to do something with it, or even to want to do something with it, is much harder.)
Take, for example, this post. In reading it over I get an impression of myself as skimming through someone’s notes from a semester-long course on productivity, that I might or might not want to take. But my emotional experience of reading it was a feeling of overwhelm at so many things to learn and do, and a desire to put off detailed reading for some imagined future when I have more time to read it and flesh out all the ideas that were not fully fleshed out.
My intellectual reflection on that says, “Bruce Lee something something thousand kicks something something one kick a thousand times”, and that I would rather read a book that spends 100 pages dealing with just one of the many, many ideas you presented here, rather than spend the time to do the mental heavy lifting needed to decompress those ideas back into something that would make them applicable for me. (Most of the implementation-related ideas here could do with a Sequence of their own, even if only a few posts worth.)
For non speed-readers, a book serves the same function as daily Sequence posts: to space out repetitions of the same idea, in different ways, so the idea becomes familiar and can be absorbed as an intuition pump, with a chance of influencing future behavior with immersion. The only way to do that with highly-condensed info, is for the reader to set up, say, an Incremental Reading process.
(People who don’t speed-read, or who listen to audiobooks, have built-in incremental reading by virtue of not reading more than a chapter or two at a sitting, and then the spacing between sittings plus the repetitions in the book supply the “poor man’s”/low-tech version of spaced repetition.)
Overall, I found this difficult to read for layout reasons, mostly. The paragraphs and sections are huge, combining multiple ideas and making it hard to identify key points. Your definition of productivity, for example, appears in only one sentence, buried in a short paragraph in the middle of a large section that at first glance appears to be about what productivity isn’t. More subheadings might be helpful, a lot more paragraph breaks definitely would.
...if you already understand and agree with them, sure.
The goal of those books is to make an emotional, “near”/concrete-construal argument for their readers to actually implement the ideas proposed, or at the very least come to believe it desirable to implement the ideas. Simply listing off the ideas doesn’t have the same effect, because it doesn’t create an emotional experience or have any of the repetition. Most people remember stories and analogies much more easily, so it’s a better way to prime intuition pumps than simple factual presentation.
(This is why the Sequences are so bloody long, too. In principle, Bayes can be explained with an equation and a few paragraphs. But getting people to do something with it, or even to want to do something with it, is much harder.)
Take, for example, this post. In reading it over I get an impression of myself as skimming through someone’s notes from a semester-long course on productivity, that I might or might not want to take. But my emotional experience of reading it was a feeling of overwhelm at so many things to learn and do, and a desire to put off detailed reading for some imagined future when I have more time to read it and flesh out all the ideas that were not fully fleshed out.
My intellectual reflection on that says, “Bruce Lee something something thousand kicks something something one kick a thousand times”, and that I would rather read a book that spends 100 pages dealing with just one of the many, many ideas you presented here, rather than spend the time to do the mental heavy lifting needed to decompress those ideas back into something that would make them applicable for me. (Most of the implementation-related ideas here could do with a Sequence of their own, even if only a few posts worth.)
For non speed-readers, a book serves the same function as daily Sequence posts: to space out repetitions of the same idea, in different ways, so the idea becomes familiar and can be absorbed as an intuition pump, with a chance of influencing future behavior with immersion. The only way to do that with highly-condensed info, is for the reader to set up, say, an Incremental Reading process.
(People who don’t speed-read, or who listen to audiobooks, have built-in incremental reading by virtue of not reading more than a chapter or two at a sitting, and then the spacing between sittings plus the repetitions in the book supply the “poor man’s”/low-tech version of spaced repetition.)
Thank you for the valuable feedback. I’ll try to improve that more in future posts and add more paragraphs here.