Life Hack: Reading More Efficiently | Ali Abdaal on All The Hacks

00:00:00.000 | I have a lot of books.

00:00:06.740 | I enjoy reading them, but I don't think I'm doing it right.

00:00:09.920 | And I know that sounds so ridiculous.

00:00:11.240 | Like I know how to read the words on the page, but I feel like if you've written posts and

00:00:16.640 | made videos about reading effectively and efficiently, I'm confident that there's a

00:00:20.860 | way I can do it better.

00:00:22.280 | So do you read on physical book or Kindle or what's your jam?

00:00:26.720 | To be honest, I a lot of times get the ebook and then I, but I sometimes really prefer

00:00:32.840 | the physical book, but I could do both.

00:00:34.620 | I'm not like wedded to one or the other, but I am not good at audio books, despite being

00:00:39.360 | great at podcasts.

00:00:40.760 | I don't know.

00:00:41.760 | I feel like whenever I'm listening to an audio book, sometimes I get distracted and then

00:00:46.720 | I realize, Oh, I missed the last five minutes.

00:00:50.240 | And if I try to not be distracted and I just like lie in bed to listen, then I find that,

00:00:54.280 | you know, I might fall asleep or something.

00:00:55.680 | Yeah, sure.

00:00:56.680 | I know.

00:00:57.680 | I know what you mean.

00:00:58.680 | I guess another question I would ask, and maybe you can answer like what your listeners

00:01:02.260 | would be thinking about this is like, why do you want to read more effectively?

00:01:06.560 | Like what's, what's the point?

00:01:08.640 | Retention.

00:01:09.640 | You know, I read a lot of things and I learned these fascinating things, especially when

00:01:13.240 | I'm reading books that people I'm interviewing have written.

00:01:16.120 | I want to remember those things, not just for five minutes, you know, not just for the

00:01:19.360 | day.

00:01:20.360 | I want to process them.

00:01:21.720 | And then, you know, to the extent they're a way to read, I don't know, faster or more

00:01:27.320 | efficiently like that, there's kind of like efficiently, maybe effectively it's like effectively

00:01:31.040 | I retain the information efficiently.

00:01:32.600 | It just happens faster.

00:01:33.600 | Yeah, sure.

00:01:34.600 | Um, have you come across building a second brain?

00:01:36.640 | So I'm, I'm going back and forth with Tiago, uh, who will come on the show a little later

00:01:41.960 | this year.

00:01:42.960 | Amazing.

00:01:43.960 | Yeah.

00:01:44.960 | That's the, I mean, I took his course in like 2019, 2020, something like that.

00:01:49.120 | And that introduced me to a lot of ideas around, um, kind of, uh, retention of staff and taking

00:01:54.960 | information and doing useful things with it.

00:01:57.560 | Um, it's a fairly expensive course, but the book covers all of the things and the book

00:02:01.840 | is like, you know, the price of a book it's, it's recently come out, but broadly, I think

00:02:05.720 | the easy hack, uh, we're all about hacks here for remembering stuff is to, um, basically

00:02:13.440 | use readwise.

00:02:14.440 | I have yet to find an app that is better than readwise at, at this, uh, which if you're

00:02:18.840 | highlighting things on Kindle, it automatically files them.

00:02:21.960 | It also has like an app where you can literally scan the text of a book as you're reading

00:02:25.880 | it.

00:02:26.880 | If you want a thing and it will OCR recognize the characters and we'll recognize what book

00:02:31.780 | it's from and we'll just categorize it automatically.

00:02:35.400 | And then just by virtue of reading that email every day of like five highlights, five things

00:02:39.160 | that have resonated enough with you for you to want to highlight that I have, I found

00:02:42.740 | that to be genuinely the single biggest thing that has changed the game in terms of my retention

00:02:47.080 | of ideas.

00:02:48.080 | And people were like, Oh, you know, when you're on podcasts, how are you able to cite all

00:02:51.320 | these sources and these books and quotes and stuff?

00:02:53.320 | I want to say, cause I look at the readwise email once in a while and it just kind of

00:02:57.400 | resurfaces the quotes.

00:02:59.000 | Um, that's like, I think the basic level that does most of the good stuff to make sure I

00:03:03.400 | got that.

00:03:04.400 | If you scan the page of a physical book, look, I mean, Apple now has this live text, right?

00:03:09.160 | You can just copy and paste the text, but this actually knows what book it is and we'll

00:03:12.700 | actually store that information also.

00:03:15.100 | I think so.

00:03:16.100 | I think there may be an intermediate step where like it connects to your Amazon account

00:03:20.220 | and it therefore knows what book you own.

00:03:22.660 | Um, and sometimes you have to like type in the name of the title or something, but like,

00:03:27.220 | yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty magical when it works.

00:03:30.220 | Um, there is an intermediate step when that particular thing doesn't work.

00:03:33.820 | Okay.

00:03:34.820 | Um, so that would be how I'd do the whole retention thing broadly.

00:03:38.620 | I mean, the actual way of retaining anything is to find a way to use that information in

00:03:42.340 | your day-to-day life, maybe to create a piece of content or something or other based around

00:03:47.020 | that.

00:03:48.020 | So if a book really, really resonates with me, I've got loads of highlights for it.

00:03:51.300 | I will try and write a book summary or write like a tweet thread summary of a book or make

00:03:55.380 | a video about the book or interview the author of the book and talk to them about the book,

00:03:59.580 | just some kind of output that creates this tangible thing, which is a reason to actually,

00:04:05.500 | um, bother retaining the stuff because it's all well and good saying that like, Oh, like

00:04:10.100 | I have this all the time.

00:04:11.100 | Like, Oh, I really want to like remember what's in this book, but if I'm not creating anything

00:04:16.420 | from it, it's, it's going to be hard beyond looking at my readwise email every day.

00:04:20.820 | Um, so for me it's, it's easy cause I do videos about books and that helps me, helps me remember

00:04:26.100 | a lot of the things, uh, readwise also synchronizes to notion.

00:04:29.900 | And so I've got a notion page that has literally everything I've ever highlighted in my life

00:04:32.940 | on Kindle or Instapaper or reader or pocket or any other app I've used to read books or

00:04:36.640 | read articles.

00:04:37.820 | And so if I ever need ideas for videos, I'll just look through my highlights and be like,

00:04:41.220 | cool.

00:04:42.220 | That's a cool idea.

00:04:43.220 | That's from that book.

00:04:44.220 | All right, cool.

00:04:45.220 | Let's piece things together and turn it into a video.

00:04:47.060 | Yeah.

00:04:48.060 | Nick Gray was on the show a couple of weeks ago, uh, and talked about friends newsletters.

00:04:51.940 | So I'd say if you need a way to take the interesting content you're consuming, I can promise you

00:04:56.580 | that it's most people, at least I do from your newsletter, find interesting, Oh, here's

00:05:01.020 | this app I checked out, here's this book I read, here's this thing I found.

00:05:04.320 | And so he proposed that everyone start a friends newsletter.

00:05:07.300 | That's just, you know, send your emails, friends, an email, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly.

00:05:12.260 | And I feel like that would be a great place to put this stuff and reinforce it, uh, which

00:05:15.980 | will help you remember it.

00:05:16.980 | So nice.

00:05:17.980 | There's, there's one tip from that episode.

Life Hack: Reading More Efficiently | Ali Abdaal on All The Hacks

Chapters