I’m a mid debugger but I think I’m pretty good at skimming, with some insight into how I do it.
Have you ever searched a large bucket of legos looking for a specific piece? When I was a kid, I noticed that as I brushed the visual of the bucket with my attention, with the intent of looking for a specific piece, my attention would ‘catch’ on certain pieces. And usually, even when it wasn’t a hit, there was a clear reason why it made sense for my attention to catch there.
When I skim, it’s quite a similar process. I have an intention firmly in mind of what sort of thing I’m interested in. I then quickly brush the pages of text with my eyes, feeling for any sort of catch on my attention. And then glance to see if it feels relevant, and if not continue. With large documents, there’s a sort of intuitive thing I’ve learned where I’ll skip several pages or even sections if the current section is too “boring” (i.e. not enough catches), or parts where my intent subtly shifts (often followed by reversing direction of skim), in ways that make the process more efficient.
If you don’t have an intuitive handle for this ‘catch’ feeling already, try noticing the physical sensation of a saccade. If you can’t get any sort of semantic content from moving your eyes this quickly across text, try practicing speedreading?
(Incidentally, this attention catch feeling seems to be the same thing (or closely related to the thing) that Buddhists call an “attachment”?? Not sure what to do with that, but thought it was interesting.)
It’s subconscious so it’s hard to say but it’s clearly not “reading every word in order” and probably doesn’t involve reading every word. I think it’s a combination of being a fast but not exceptionally fast reader, plus a lot of domain knowledge so I can understand the stuff I am reading as fast as I read it, plus a ton of domain-specific skimming skill / pattern recognition to bring the interesting part to conscious attention.
Do you literally read all the text on the screen, or do you have a way of efficiently skimming?
I’m a mid debugger but I think I’m pretty good at skimming, with some insight into how I do it.
Have you ever searched a large bucket of legos looking for a specific piece? When I was a kid, I noticed that as I brushed the visual of the bucket with my attention, with the intent of looking for a specific piece, my attention would ‘catch’ on certain pieces. And usually, even when it wasn’t a hit, there was a clear reason why it made sense for my attention to catch there.
When I skim, it’s quite a similar process. I have an intention firmly in mind of what sort of thing I’m interested in. I then quickly brush the pages of text with my eyes, feeling for any sort of catch on my attention. And then glance to see if it feels relevant, and if not continue. With large documents, there’s a sort of intuitive thing I’ve learned where I’ll skip several pages or even sections if the current section is too “boring” (i.e. not enough catches), or parts where my intent subtly shifts (often followed by reversing direction of skim), in ways that make the process more efficient.
If you don’t have an intuitive handle for this ‘catch’ feeling already, try noticing the physical sensation of a saccade. If you can’t get any sort of semantic content from moving your eyes this quickly across text, try practicing speedreading?
(Incidentally, this attention catch feeling seems to be the same thing (or closely related to the thing) that Buddhists call an “attachment”?? Not sure what to do with that, but thought it was interesting.)
It’s subconscious so it’s hard to say but it’s clearly not “reading every word in order” and probably doesn’t involve reading every word. I think it’s a combination of being a fast but not exceptionally fast reader, plus a lot of domain knowledge so I can understand the stuff I am reading as fast as I read it, plus a ton of domain-specific skimming skill / pattern recognition to bring the interesting part to conscious attention.