I really dislike this sort of blog. Every article feels like it was written for their affiliates and for search engines, and rarely for the readers. It's certainly not written for people with ADHD.
Here's the only useful paragraph in the article:
> This idea came from Megan, a guest on Hal Elrod’s podcast. Megan explained she keeps track of all the books she reads in a spreadsheet. Each time she finishes a book she adds it to her spreadsheet, along with the ONE thing she is going to implement. With each new entry she reviews the list. If she isn’t implementing her ONE thing, she goes back and rereads the book.
Perhaps we read different kinds of books, but I don't see the benefit of this. I read for pleasure, without taking notes or setting objectives. I feel like those would interrupt rather than encourage reading. Good books tend to stay with you either way.
I found that a good book in a good environment is all I really need to read more. It takes 5-10 minutes before my thoughts stop buzzing around and I can focus, but once I'm in that zone, I'm good for a while.
Looks like you found the ONE thing in this article.
(jk)
I do agree with you. I read for pleasure and to satisfy curiosity. it's hard (or pointless) to try to find one thing to implement from curiousity driven exploring.
> I found that a good book in a good environment is all I really need to read more. It takes 5-10 minutes before my thoughts stop buzzing around and I can focus, but once I'm in that zone, I'm good for a while.
I think there is a huge variance in how ADHD people process information. I am 100% this way as well, but know just as many ADHD people who literally cannot finish reading even a short book. They often report audiobooks and podcasts as being much better, but I can take about 5-10 minutes of auditory input max before I am completely done. If I'm not moving I'll fall asleep[1], if I am moving my mind will wander and I'll just have 20 minute intervals that I have zero recall of ever hearing.
1: This made college lectures quite challenging. For one particularly bad class where the professor dimmed the lights to use an overhead projector, I sat in front of someone who had ample reason to want to kick me and told them to kick me any time I fell asleep. In another one that was fairly small (maybe 50 students?) the professor seemed to get sympathetic noticing I was struggling to stay awake and would wake me up as needed.
I agree. It reads like those GPT-3-generated articles from a while back that were spread on HN as an experiment[1]. They also tended to be (IIRC) self-help style blog posts, and we're about as substantive as this one.
Ditto on environment. I had found that getting out of my normal setting helped with this immensely for me. Going to a coffee shop had been working pretty well (not every time but most times), but covid killed that routine.
No thanks to a spreadsheet though. Lots of adhd advice around bullet journals too, but that worked as well as every other past attempt to keep a journal in my life.
I'm going to suggest "How to Live," a biography of Montaigne with several rules encapsulating his philosophy of life. One of them is "read voraciously, and forget most of what you read."
I read over a book a day last year and they certainly weren't "useful" or "worthy" in the sense of what your quote is talking about. But for my ADHD the problem I have is not reading, because for me the linear train of thought in the written word is soothing and settles my brain down in a way nothing else does. And for that purpose I don't want difficult to read, and I especially don't want clever literary tricks.
As a fellow ADHD-er, completely agree about reading conditions, like the environment and how well the book is suited to your tastes/mood, rather than an organizational system. The one place I've been able to read a book cover-to-cover in a single sitting was while backpacking. Found a comfy rock in shade, got into the Reading Zone, got through all of Andy Weir's "Artemis" that day.
> Every article feels like it was written for their affiliates and for search engines.
I've noticed this with youtube videos. Sometimes I will search for something, and I get a video equivalent to this webpage, very generic/general with a synthesized voice. It's getting harder and harder to wade through the crap.
> but once I'm in that zone, I'm good for a while.
Yes, I thought people with ADHD had superfocus as well.
I have the opposite problem. My problem with ADHD is that if I start a novel and the novel is decent, I will not stop reading until I finish the book or series of book. No matter what work I need to do, I'll even forget to eat and will not go to sleep until I'm either finished or I'm so tired that I need reread the same sentence multiple times before I understand it. It's great in that I've read a lot of books, but it's also been a source of problems more than once when I blew things off because I have a book to finish.
With non-fiction, it depends, if the subject interests me, I can become equally focused, if it doesn't, there's very little chances that I will finish it. But I also have weird interests, once I became obsessed with finding the best health insurance plan and read all the 100 of pages of terms and conditions of the different plans in a day (very dry material). I know that now that I'm no longer in the mood to do that, I would never be able to read a single page.
Struggling with ADHD is not a matter of not being able to focus. Part of the issue is directing and keeping attention on non-pleasant tasks that are stacked up against a brain chronically low on dopamine and norepinephrine transmission.
As someone with diagnosed and treated ADHD, these articles are misleading. In my opinion it's dangerous to claim "Do this ONE behavioural thing and your ADHD goes away (or gets easier.)"
After struggling with ADHD for 25+ years I can tell you: These life-hacks don't work. Please, consult with a medical professional instead. It'll save you years of agony and disappointment.
Again, if you have – or suspect – ADHD, work with a psychiatrist to discuss diagnosis and treatment options. Period.
Quoting Dr. Russell Barkeley "ADHD is one, if not the best-understood psychiatric conditions. We understand it for several decades now - it's also called the diabetes of psychiatry because there's treatment"[^1].
So, we know what it is and have known how to treat it. It's a neuro-genetic disease, and we have had working medications for – I think – 50 years including the obvious methylphenidate and dexamphetamines.
After reading the article and so many like it, I feel frustrated because I think they're predatory. They're targeting neuro-divergent people like myself. And boy, did I fall into those traps over and over again until I enrolled in actual medical treatment.
I'll assume that Jacqueline writes and published this in good faith to a point. My smell-test says otherwise - but please correct me if I'm wrong: The article smells like a classic "authority" post that's designed to generate leads for her mailing-list via the "free"-for-email ebook "YOUR ADHD STRENGTHS" just below. Once singed up I imagine I'll... [conjecture!] get an email drip campaign for a week providing "value" to join her community to eventually be offered an intro offer for $37 with an upsell for $197 etc.
> Please, consult with a medical professional instead.
I feel like this might be a dumb question, but what brand of medical professional should you go to? I've discussed with my GP, but those discussions usually don't have any meaningful advice.
I'm very similar which is why I read easier to digest fiction, for me books provide a coherent linear train of thought that works to soothe my naturally chaotic headspace, which is an addicting sensation to someone with ADHD. I struggle with novels that employ complex writing tricks for this same reason, non-linearity just exacerbates my internal chaos rather than calming it.
The article lacked substance but I am glad that we are talking about reading with ADHD here.
I don't feel guilty about not finishing books because most of the times if I force myself to finish a book that I don't find interesting enough, I don't remember the information in the book anyway.
Over time I have learned to trust my brain, and figured that it will remember the important parts I read. If the book bores me then probably there is nothing interesting in it for me.
Most of my life I read books without taking notes, and I would go through them thinking that I understand everything, but in the end I would miss deeper connections and wouldn't connect them to the information I already possess.
Now, I read non-fiction books with taking notes and taking notes makes me stop and think about what I am reading and enables me to make deeper connections with what I already know and improves retaining. Also shifting from reading to note taking and going back helps my ADD brain. I read a couple books at a time, and when I get bored of one, I shift to another one that interests me. I choose my books around one topic, and this topical similarity makes my ADHD a boon because this way I can make those books talk to each other and improve my understanding of the subject. I used to take all my notes longhand before, but now I type really fast and writing longhand feels antiquated now. I also love to be able to search my notes and use my notes as a second-brain.
I read both from kindle and paper-books. The change from kindle to paper also helps my brain. The variety increases my concentration.
When I am reading fiction, I try to visualize everything I read because if I stop visualizing, it turns into eye training, I think other things, or just read and don't remember anything. If I figure out I am eye training instead of reading, I stop reading the book and come back later.
I don't have the diagnosis but certainly recognize add elements in how I navigate the world. My conclusion was that there are actually quite a lot of books that just start out great and objectively become worse as the page count goes up (like The subtle art of not giving a F. You really start feeling "yeah, ok, I get it." There are also books that are the other way around (like Atlas shrugged) where you struggle through the first half and then almost read the second half in one go.
I'm not sure I've ever found a non-textbook science/math/philosophy book where the last chapter or two wasn't entirely skippable. There seems to be the point where the authors start stretching past what they really know and into more speculative, almost like they are planning the next book. I don't blame them, but it's not what I'm in that book for always.
This is a great example. I liked this book, but it could have been a blog article, or hell, even a single sentence: Konmari can also apply to obligations.
Sadly, publishing world is guilty of turning popular blog post series into books because the bloggers have a platform to promote. Then the bloggers turn each paragraph in their famous blog post into chapters in their book. You can understand that kind of books by reading the first few paragraphs of each chapter. As an example, Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life comes to my mind. I think he turned a Quora answer to a book for that one.
I love books that make me think along, and take me a lot of time to finish. James N. Frey's How to write a damn good novel is my example for that kind of book.
I would love to hear the books you have studied thoroughly.
Yes! I have just discovered this recently myself as well: whenever I wander off I context switch to something else I want to do instead of reforcing focus: multiple books, work, anki, side projects. Good so far.
I don't use a particular system. I am using Evernote to take all my notes because I take notes on many machines and when I started note taking Evernote was the only one I found with multi-device support.
Rarely, when I come across an interesting sentence structure or a great way to express an idea I write the exact words that is in the books.
Usually, I paraphrase what I have read, and jot down why I find it worthwhile. If the idea leads to new ones I follow those as well. I used to skip these thoughts because I thought reading the book was more important, but now I am focused on getting the most out of a book and following my thoughts, and thinking about the information is part of it.
Before, the title of the notes used to be the book's title and I would organize my notes based on titles. But for a couple years I have been taking notes around subjects. Since I also read around subjects, my note taking and my reading support each other nicely. If you consider starting to take notes while you are reading, I'd suggest going with subject based organization. If a note can be part of more than one subject, I copy the note to the other notebooks.
This subject based note taking also helps with understanding my interests, because some subjects grow dramatically while others grow marginally.
It also works as an early alert system when you are slacking off on areas you have to know but skip because you find them boring. This early alert system is extremely important for people with ADHD. I don't know about you, but I tend to over-focus on areas that I find interesting and don't touch areas that I don't. Then I try to make the areas that are important more interesting.
Not OP, but I mostly highlight and occasionally sprinkle in some text pointers. My goal is for future me to be able to pick up the book and only have to review the highlights to understand the important points.
Occasionally I’ll also use an index card as a bookmark and write page numbers with 1-2 word summaries of big ideas.
No. ADHD does not work this way for me, or people like me who are inattentive . This article is the equivalent of the time my primary care physician said, “just use a calendar”. You want me to maintain a set of documents? Buddy, without meds I can’t remember to brush my fucking teeth. I’m not exaggerating. ADHD is a spectrum, articles like this paint everyone with the same brush, which furthers many people to feel like complete failures.
One of my motivations for getting into programming was to be able to learn to have the computer take on much of the remembering. I tried various paper methods, but all of them required one thing I didn't have: the ability to remember to actually look at them for the information I put into them. When I got a computer capable of managing my calendar, tasks, grocery lists, etc, it was a dream because I only need to put something in and tell the computer to remind me. Andy Matuschak calls it "programmable attention" https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Programmable_attention
I can relate to this. Without medication I don't have any motivation to do ANYTHING, and that quickly leads to depression. My doctor recommended that I don't medicate on weekends, but what about my personal life? I have things I need to get done at home. My wife likes to with me and my executive functions, too.
I can relate. My compromise is to only take my morning dose on the weekends(most of the time). Do things and sort of wander off into the evening. The timing, dose, rhythm of your meds may differ, of course. Mine is not the extended release.
For me, there is a big difference of how effective the meds are during the week because I have gone light over the weekends.
Brushing your teeth is a great example - I just brushed mine after reading this. It seems like there are so many things people just take for granted - remembering what you're supposed to do today specifically in addition to the 100 things normies seem to do automatically, knowing what day it is. The only thing that's helped consistently is using Google to "remind me to call the school in 20 minutes"
I use my Android phone's stock alarm app for reminders, set to a very annoying ringtone. It works great about 50% of the time when I actually have the opportunity to stop what I'm doing and do what the alarm says...
Very much this. My son has ADHD (full neuropsych eval) and he has attention issues, but his main challenge is executive functioning. Daily routines do exist, but are achieved through literally months of repetition, not by conscious effort to identify and organize all of the things that need to happen before school, after school, etc.
Establishing and sticking to a formal program to read books is literally the hardest thing he could do, but when he finds a book he likes, he'll stay up late to read it, and would stay up all night if we let him.
It sounds like your kid has a similar ADHD experience to how mine was when I was younger, so I feel compelled to say this:
The best thing my parents did raising me (and it wasn't easy) was to put a lot of effort into exposing me to books I was interested in and to exercise a very light hand in terms of how late into the night I read. The combination of reading habits and a practiced ability to educate myself from books has served me very well in the decades since. It's operated as both a coping mechanism for the drawbacks of ADHD (such as habitual inattention to in-person communication) and, as my other skills have caught up, a key tool that some of my peers are lacking.
Daily routines were more difficult for me, and took a set of experiments in my early 20s (think daily alarms/calendar events on the order of "wake up" ... "work out"... "eat breakfast" ... "take shower/brush teeth" increments) to really lock into place (although they have taken a blow in the last year).
Thanks, this comment reminded me to brush my teeth.
More seriously, I think that people have a tendency to mix up broad, high-level symptoms of ADHD with the more specific ways that those symptoms manifest for them.
For some (not all) people with ADHD, acting on their motivations is very difficult; so the technique they come up with to help is to either drastically increase their motivation (moving up deadlines and hyper-stressing about tasks, or rewarding themselves, or whatever), or to try and decrease the barriers of entry to the task (automating parts of it, getting help from another person, etc...)
So it sounds like this author falls somewhat into that category, and one of the specific reasons they've found for them personally that's a barrier to reading is guilt over the idea that they aren't finishing books. And what they've done is given themselves permission not to finish books, which allows them to read more overall. Which, great. Genuinely glad that works, and it might work for other people too.
But lots of people who fall into that category of struggling with executive dysfunction are not going to have the same barriers over reading. For many of them, turning reading into a chore will actually be counterproductive. Having a document that you forget to review every week might increase guilt. "Read to find one improvement" might not even line up with why they're motivated to read books in the first place.
And that's obviously ignoring that ADHD also covers people who struggle with inattentiveness and other problems that could also be a barrier to reading more -- but the point is, just because a solution works for one person with ADHD, it might not be applicable even to other people who are struggling with the same problem, because the general issue "I can't act on my motivations" is still going to manifest differently and have different solutions depending on what the individual's barriers are to a specific task.
Lots of addicted folk talk this way. I couldn’t function without ____, where ____ could be anything from coffee to amphetamines. That isn’t to say that you are abusing the medication, but that the dividing line is more arbitrary than most people understand. Many addicts are simply people with inadequate health coverage who are forced to self medicate, often with the exact same substances (adderal, benzodiazepines, pain killers) that those with better doctors and more wealth get quite easily without stigma or threat of prison. The fact these substances operate as performance enhancers for entire industries (truck drivers and programmers are big amphetamine users) all point to the ridiculous double standard that we arbitrarily erect to classify some as addicts and others as patients. Mostly it’s a question of the wealth of the addict, which for programmers on speed tends to not be a limiting factor.
The ridiculous double standard is that we see physical devices -- glasses, hearing aids, canes, as corrective, but drugs that treat disabilities are seen as "crutches", which happens to also be a physical metaphor, but one that implies some transience, suggesting that eventually we'll get better and not need the drug.
Try telling a deaf or blind person that their assistance devices are "crutches" they'll eventually not need and see how that works out. Would you say a paraplegic in a wheelchair is an addict? Do you expect them to somehow magically grow legs and be able to walk, if they could just "give up" the chair?
That's what accusing people who need pharmaceuticals to function sounds like. It's implying they are morally inadequate for needing their drugs.
Hey, I'm someone with ADHD but that never had any medication.
Most of the time, I can't function. I'm exactly as they describe they are without medication. The only way I get through it is by doing things that need to be done faster.
And thankfully for me it's not as hard to focus on programming. Actually programming is probably the thing I'm best at, despite my inattentiveness costing me. It's everything else that is the issue.
Best analogy I have is vaguely RPG like. Let's say "normal" is 0, and the medication at a given dosage adds, say, +5.
So people without ADHD, take Ritalin, hit 5, get a buzz, smash out that project.
Then there's people with ADHD, who're starting at -5. They take the drugs, hit 0, don't get a buzz, and maybe actually start that project now that they're better able to ignore the delights of Wikipedia articles on the role of headwear for class signaling in Victorian England.
There's people who take morphine to get high, and there's people who take morphine to treat pain. Same shit.
For the benefit of people like me, I'm quoting the part of the article that should have been at the top.
> 1. Create a Word or Google document to track your books if spreadsheets fill you with fear.
> 2. You don’t need to read the whole book. Write down your ONE thing from the part of the book you did read.
> 3. Review the document weekly, to keep the ideas fresh in your mind.
> 4. If you find that you stopped implementing your ONE thing, go back to the book and either continue reading where you had left off or reread the part that you already read.
Have to say, as someone with reasonably severe inattentive-type ADHD, the hard part of this wouldn't so much be reading the book, but maintaining those documents and reviewing them weekly. The amount of half-finished lists, organisers, documents, etc I have on every cloud, note-taking and todo-list platform available that I never look at again in attempts to organise things like this is too high to count.
I believe that those articles are unreadable for everyone. They are written for search engines.
I built a whole business around giving straightforward answers. I remove superfluous text, and I use formatting to make my content easier to skim. There's no clickbait, no cookie notice, no newsletter prompt, no author bio and no sidebar content. There's just you and the answer you came for, and it loads in under 500 milliseconds.
This is working so well that it makes me wonder why other websites go out of their way to hide their answers. When I have simple gardening questions ("how much sun does [plant] need?", I have to click 3-4 results and scroll a few pages to get the answer. Even with a finely tuned ad blocker, the experience is infuriating.
Don't forget that you also need to add filler so you can shove a couple of ads in the middle of the stream. Add a side-story about your uncle that is completely irrelevant so you have room for one ad more! Then paginate the thing so the ads on the sides + top and bottom can reload for more impressions. And we feel it's important to offer our readers a nice flow, so add some history events so the back-button doesn't work properly anymore. And don't forget the modal to subscribe to the newsletter!
I don't have ADHD but often find it hard to finish books too. I honestly think that there's a lot of books that are simply not worth reading. Reading a book is quite a commitment (may take up to a month for me). I often lose interest once I realize that whole book is a single idea that could be summed up in a blog post but stretched to fit 300 pages.
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” -- Francis Bacon
Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book provides a decent framework for dealing with the variety of books out there. There are also tools like Polar[1] that provide an easy way to do incremental reading[2] which may help when attacking a book piece by relevant piece.
Some of those "low density" books are actually about changing your emotional responses or embedding an idea though. Sure you can distill the entire book down to a couple of pages and get the core idea, but your lizard brain isn't going to actually absorb the idea and put it into practice in your life. A lot of the repetition in self-help books in particular is about reinforcing the idea in multiple different contexts and building a proper representation of different behaviour in the reader's mind.
Yes. There are a lot of books, say "business" books, that properly fleshed out with examples and context are longer than any magazine is going to publish. (Lots of the oft-quoted concepts like Crossing the Chasm fit into this category.) But they could easily fit in something like 20 to 75 pages. However, publishing economics--which still broadly apply--dictate something like a 250-300 page work.
With my last book, I expanded on a couple areas in a new edition and I feel better about the overall information density. But in the original, I definitely felt I was padding here and there to hit a page target.
That's actually the basis of... I forget the name... There's a new-ish product doing the rounds on YouTube sponsorships. Basically, they distill every book into its core ideas, and present them as a 15-minute chunk.
I like the idea, not because I dislike reading, but because it's handy to have an "idea map" of a book. The ToC is ostensibly that, but it's hard to figure out what their points are from the titles alone.
Wish I could remember what the company was called, but whatever. Haven't used them myself, but it struck me as a neat concept.
I think you mean https://www.blinkist.com/. I used it for a year, it's great for those low-density books. But really I'd like to read books, only the ones that are really interesting and valuable. My problem is that I don't want to spend money on ones that I then find are not worth the time. Perhaps someone can recommend a good subscription service with decent selection? How does scribd selection compare to amazon?
That was pretty disappointing. I was hoping for more substance. Seems rather than giving strategies on how to read books with ADHD the article devolved into telling people with ADHD to embrace that they never finish any books.
I'm also not sure what "one thing I am going to take action on" means when the current book I'm reading is a history of Australian-East Timorese foreign relations. In general it sounds like a tactic for reading self-help or spirituality books and not much else?
I also don’t see how that thought will help. I don’t have the attention to focus on a book, I’ll surely forget my thought about what I’m going to take action on.
Agreed. It wasn't so much 'how to read books' as 'how to get something out of books (without actually reading most of them)'.
For people who want to actually get through books, I'd recommend this tool [1], which I created several years back. It has become fairly popular in the ADHD world and is recommended at top universities (Stanford/Yale/Dartmouth) to students with ADHD and dyslexia. It works with Kindle books as well as many websites.
The Chrome extension comes with a 2-week free pass and I'm happy to send a month-long pass to any HNers out there who can benefit from it.
This looks like a neat idea! A couple of questions if you don't mind:
1. Does the pass apply to the Firefox version too?
2. When you say "It works with Kindle books..." what do you mean? On desktop only? (My) Kindle doesn't have colour.
When it comes to long, difficult slogs, I prefer audiobooks. Mostly consumed when exercising outside in nature.
Imagine reading Moby Dick, and the author goes into a long boring diatribe about 19th century cetology. If you're sitting at home reading a physical book, pushing through is a long, difficult process that requires continuous effortful willpower. But when you're running a 10km, at worst you just zone out util the chapter's done. It's not like you have anything else to do. Sure, it's not optimal in terms of reading retention, but it's better than giving up completely because you can't force yourself to turn the pages.
As somebody with ADHD, I can't consume audiobooks at all. My mind just starts to wander 10 seconds in and eventually I realize I haven't been listening for the past half-hour. It's the same with talks or lectures on YouTube, though I've found that putting them at 2x speed helps to keep my attention.
I really do need a book in text form, because it allows me full control over how quickly or in what order I consume it. I learned a long time ago that reading books linearly doesn't work for me, so reading as I do involves a thorough look at the table of contents, then a lot of skimming and jumping back and forth to find the most interesting/stimulating bits and assembling that into a coherent view of the book.
Yeah same here. I only tried audio books once or twice, it just didn't do it for me. I need the physical images of the words in front of me in order to keep them in my head. I've also found physical books to be much more forgiving of micro-distractions. When some sound from across the house distracts me, all I need to do to "pause" the reading is... stop reading. My eyes can wander around the page briefly and I don't lose anything. But with audio, I am finding myself manually needing to pause, rewind, etc.
I also listen to lectures and so on at higher speeds! People I know think I'm crazy when they walk in and hear someone yammering about some dev topic in a chipmunk's voice, but I just get so impatient with slower speech.
I can only consume audiobooks if I'm doing something else. It seems I have to push my brain to the edge of activity it can absorb at once. Too little activity (just listening to an audiobook) and I get bored and distracted. Too much activity (listening while coding) and I don't do either well. Listening while doing mindless tasks like cleaning or exercising seem to be just the right amount of mental activity to keep me engaged well.
Moby Dick was one of the first "real" books I touched as child.
I got it from the school library over the summer vacations.
I have to admit that I too found the asides boring and only managed to get about halfway through until the end of the vacations. At the beginning of the new school year I had to return it but had the intent to borrow it again to finish it. I never did and this must be the longest open point on my personal to do list. I wonder if - after so much time has passed - I still would find the asides boring...
This seems like better advice. For fiction, or even some non-fiction texts like philosophical treatises, I find I can amble through an audiobook by putting it on while I fall asleep, and then back-tracking a little each night.
The advice in the article pertains specifically to non-fiction, didactic literature, and hints that most books of this nature really are full of fluff. For those there's a few take-aways that you could have gotten from a concise article, instead of getting stuck in someone's ramblings.
> the author goes into a long boring diatribe about 19th century cetology. If you're sitting at home reading a physical book //
Don't you just scan ahead and jump to the next bit? I have a problem with doing this with novels I like, if it's getting intense then I'll want to skip/scan-read to get to the next tranche of "action". I do the same with TV/films, if there's a filler scene, just skip to the next scene.
Readit News
Here's the only useful paragraph in the article:
> This idea came from Megan, a guest on Hal Elrod’s podcast. Megan explained she keeps track of all the books she reads in a spreadsheet. Each time she finishes a book she adds it to her spreadsheet, along with the ONE thing she is going to implement. With each new entry she reviews the list. If she isn’t implementing her ONE thing, she goes back and rereads the book.
Perhaps we read different kinds of books, but I don't see the benefit of this. I read for pleasure, without taking notes or setting objectives. I feel like those would interrupt rather than encourage reading. Good books tend to stay with you either way.
I found that a good book in a good environment is all I really need to read more. It takes 5-10 minutes before my thoughts stop buzzing around and I can focus, but once I'm in that zone, I'm good for a while.
Looks like you found the ONE thing in this article.
(jk)
I do agree with you. I read for pleasure and to satisfy curiosity. it's hard (or pointless) to try to find one thing to implement from curiousity driven exploring.
I think there is a huge variance in how ADHD people process information. I am 100% this way as well, but know just as many ADHD people who literally cannot finish reading even a short book. They often report audiobooks and podcasts as being much better, but I can take about 5-10 minutes of auditory input max before I am completely done. If I'm not moving I'll fall asleep[1], if I am moving my mind will wander and I'll just have 20 minute intervals that I have zero recall of ever hearing.
1: This made college lectures quite challenging. For one particularly bad class where the professor dimmed the lights to use an overhead projector, I sat in front of someone who had ample reason to want to kick me and told them to kick me any time I fell asleep. In another one that was fairly small (maybe 50 students?) the professor seemed to get sympathetic noticing I was struggling to stay awake and would wake me up as needed.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt...
No thanks to a spreadsheet though. Lots of adhd advice around bullet journals too, but that worked as well as every other past attempt to keep a journal in my life.
If I'm stuck insight, I'll light some candles and read on the couch, or run myself a bath. It's a great way to end the day.
I've noticed this with youtube videos. Sometimes I will search for something, and I get a video equivalent to this webpage, very generic/general with a synthesized voice. It's getting harder and harder to wade through the crap.
> but once I'm in that zone, I'm good for a while.
Yes, I thought people with ADHD had superfocus as well.
With non-fiction, it depends, if the subject interests me, I can become equally focused, if it doesn't, there's very little chances that I will finish it. But I also have weird interests, once I became obsessed with finding the best health insurance plan and read all the 100 of pages of terms and conditions of the different plans in a day (very dry material). I know that now that I'm no longer in the mood to do that, I would never be able to read a single page.
Struggling with ADHD is not a matter of not being able to focus. Part of the issue is directing and keeping attention on non-pleasant tasks that are stacked up against a brain chronically low on dopamine and norepinephrine transmission.
As someone with diagnosed and treated ADHD, these articles are misleading. In my opinion it's dangerous to claim "Do this ONE behavioural thing and your ADHD goes away (or gets easier.)"
After struggling with ADHD for 25+ years I can tell you: These life-hacks don't work. Please, consult with a medical professional instead. It'll save you years of agony and disappointment.
Again, if you have – or suspect – ADHD, work with a psychiatrist to discuss diagnosis and treatment options. Period.
Quoting Dr. Russell Barkeley "ADHD is one, if not the best-understood psychiatric conditions. We understand it for several decades now - it's also called the diabetes of psychiatry because there's treatment"[^1].
So, we know what it is and have known how to treat it. It's a neuro-genetic disease, and we have had working medications for – I think – 50 years including the obvious methylphenidate and dexamphetamines.
After reading the article and so many like it, I feel frustrated because I think they're predatory. They're targeting neuro-divergent people like myself. And boy, did I fall into those traps over and over again until I enrolled in actual medical treatment.
I'll assume that Jacqueline writes and published this in good faith to a point. My smell-test says otherwise - but please correct me if I'm wrong: The article smells like a classic "authority" post that's designed to generate leads for her mailing-list via the "free"-for-email ebook "YOUR ADHD STRENGTHS" just below. Once singed up I imagine I'll... [conjecture!] get an email drip campaign for a week providing "value" to join her community to eventually be offered an intro offer for $37 with an upsell for $197 etc.
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo
I feel like this might be a dumb question, but what brand of medical professional should you go to? I've discussed with my GP, but those discussions usually don't have any meaningful advice.
Dead Comment
I don't feel guilty about not finishing books because most of the times if I force myself to finish a book that I don't find interesting enough, I don't remember the information in the book anyway.
Over time I have learned to trust my brain, and figured that it will remember the important parts I read. If the book bores me then probably there is nothing interesting in it for me.
Most of my life I read books without taking notes, and I would go through them thinking that I understand everything, but in the end I would miss deeper connections and wouldn't connect them to the information I already possess.
Now, I read non-fiction books with taking notes and taking notes makes me stop and think about what I am reading and enables me to make deeper connections with what I already know and improves retaining. Also shifting from reading to note taking and going back helps my ADD brain. I read a couple books at a time, and when I get bored of one, I shift to another one that interests me. I choose my books around one topic, and this topical similarity makes my ADHD a boon because this way I can make those books talk to each other and improve my understanding of the subject. I used to take all my notes longhand before, but now I type really fast and writing longhand feels antiquated now. I also love to be able to search my notes and use my notes as a second-brain.
I read both from kindle and paper-books. The change from kindle to paper also helps my brain. The variety increases my concentration.
When I am reading fiction, I try to visualize everything I read because if I stop visualizing, it turns into eye training, I think other things, or just read and don't remember anything. If I figure out I am eye training instead of reading, I stop reading the book and come back later.
I hope this helps.
This is a great example. I liked this book, but it could have been a blog article, or hell, even a single sentence: Konmari can also apply to obligations.
I love books that make me think along, and take me a lot of time to finish. James N. Frey's How to write a damn good novel is my example for that kind of book.
I would love to hear the books you have studied thoroughly.
Rarely, when I come across an interesting sentence structure or a great way to express an idea I write the exact words that is in the books.
Usually, I paraphrase what I have read, and jot down why I find it worthwhile. If the idea leads to new ones I follow those as well. I used to skip these thoughts because I thought reading the book was more important, but now I am focused on getting the most out of a book and following my thoughts, and thinking about the information is part of it.
Before, the title of the notes used to be the book's title and I would organize my notes based on titles. But for a couple years I have been taking notes around subjects. Since I also read around subjects, my note taking and my reading support each other nicely. If you consider starting to take notes while you are reading, I'd suggest going with subject based organization. If a note can be part of more than one subject, I copy the note to the other notebooks.
This subject based note taking also helps with understanding my interests, because some subjects grow dramatically while others grow marginally.
It also works as an early alert system when you are slacking off on areas you have to know but skip because you find them boring. This early alert system is extremely important for people with ADHD. I don't know about you, but I tend to over-focus on areas that I find interesting and don't touch areas that I don't. Then I try to make the areas that are important more interesting.
Occasionally I’ll also use an index card as a bookmark and write page numbers with 1-2 word summaries of big ideas.
For me, there is a big difference of how effective the meds are during the week because I have gone light over the weekends.
Establishing and sticking to a formal program to read books is literally the hardest thing he could do, but when he finds a book he likes, he'll stay up late to read it, and would stay up all night if we let him.
The best thing my parents did raising me (and it wasn't easy) was to put a lot of effort into exposing me to books I was interested in and to exercise a very light hand in terms of how late into the night I read. The combination of reading habits and a practiced ability to educate myself from books has served me very well in the decades since. It's operated as both a coping mechanism for the drawbacks of ADHD (such as habitual inattention to in-person communication) and, as my other skills have caught up, a key tool that some of my peers are lacking.
Daily routines were more difficult for me, and took a set of experiments in my early 20s (think daily alarms/calendar events on the order of "wake up" ... "work out"... "eat breakfast" ... "take shower/brush teeth" increments) to really lock into place (although they have taken a blow in the last year).
More seriously, I think that people have a tendency to mix up broad, high-level symptoms of ADHD with the more specific ways that those symptoms manifest for them.
For some (not all) people with ADHD, acting on their motivations is very difficult; so the technique they come up with to help is to either drastically increase their motivation (moving up deadlines and hyper-stressing about tasks, or rewarding themselves, or whatever), or to try and decrease the barriers of entry to the task (automating parts of it, getting help from another person, etc...)
So it sounds like this author falls somewhat into that category, and one of the specific reasons they've found for them personally that's a barrier to reading is guilt over the idea that they aren't finishing books. And what they've done is given themselves permission not to finish books, which allows them to read more overall. Which, great. Genuinely glad that works, and it might work for other people too.
But lots of people who fall into that category of struggling with executive dysfunction are not going to have the same barriers over reading. For many of them, turning reading into a chore will actually be counterproductive. Having a document that you forget to review every week might increase guilt. "Read to find one improvement" might not even line up with why they're motivated to read books in the first place.
And that's obviously ignoring that ADHD also covers people who struggle with inattentiveness and other problems that could also be a barrier to reading more -- but the point is, just because a solution works for one person with ADHD, it might not be applicable even to other people who are struggling with the same problem, because the general issue "I can't act on my motivations" is still going to manifest differently and have different solutions depending on what the individual's barriers are to a specific task.
Try telling a deaf or blind person that their assistance devices are "crutches" they'll eventually not need and see how that works out. Would you say a paraplegic in a wheelchair is an addict? Do you expect them to somehow magically grow legs and be able to walk, if they could just "give up" the chair?
That's what accusing people who need pharmaceuticals to function sounds like. It's implying they are morally inadequate for needing their drugs.
Most of the time, I can't function. I'm exactly as they describe they are without medication. The only way I get through it is by doing things that need to be done faster.
And thankfully for me it's not as hard to focus on programming. Actually programming is probably the thing I'm best at, despite my inattentiveness costing me. It's everything else that is the issue.
So people without ADHD, take Ritalin, hit 5, get a buzz, smash out that project.
Then there's people with ADHD, who're starting at -5. They take the drugs, hit 0, don't get a buzz, and maybe actually start that project now that they're better able to ignore the delights of Wikipedia articles on the role of headwear for class signaling in Victorian England.
There's people who take morphine to get high, and there's people who take morphine to treat pain. Same shit.
> 1. Create a Word or Google document to track your books if spreadsheets fill you with fear.
> 2. You don’t need to read the whole book. Write down your ONE thing from the part of the book you did read.
> 3. Review the document weekly, to keep the ideas fresh in your mind.
> 4. If you find that you stopped implementing your ONE thing, go back to the book and either continue reading where you had left off or reread the part that you already read.
I'll go read the entire article some other time.
I built a whole business around giving straightforward answers. I remove superfluous text, and I use formatting to make my content easier to skim. There's no clickbait, no cookie notice, no newsletter prompt, no author bio and no sidebar content. There's just you and the answer you came for, and it loads in under 500 milliseconds.
This is working so well that it makes me wonder why other websites go out of their way to hide their answers. When I have simple gardening questions ("how much sun does [plant] need?", I have to click 3-4 results and scroll a few pages to get the answer. Even with a finely tuned ad blocker, the experience is infuriating.
Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book provides a decent framework for dealing with the variety of books out there. There are also tools like Polar[1] that provide an easy way to do incremental reading[2] which may help when attacking a book piece by relevant piece.
[1] https://getpolarized.io/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading
With my last book, I expanded on a couple areas in a new edition and I feel better about the overall information density. But in the original, I definitely felt I was padding here and there to hit a page target.
I like the idea, not because I dislike reading, but because it's handy to have an "idea map" of a book. The ToC is ostensibly that, but it's hard to figure out what their points are from the titles alone.
Wish I could remember what the company was called, but whatever. Haven't used them myself, but it struck me as a neat concept.
For people who want to actually get through books, I'd recommend this tool [1], which I created several years back. It has become fairly popular in the ADHD world and is recommended at top universities (Stanford/Yale/Dartmouth) to students with ADHD and dyslexia. It works with Kindle books as well as many websites.
The Chrome extension comes with a 2-week free pass and I'm happy to send a month-long pass to any HNers out there who can benefit from it.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...
Imagine reading Moby Dick, and the author goes into a long boring diatribe about 19th century cetology. If you're sitting at home reading a physical book, pushing through is a long, difficult process that requires continuous effortful willpower. But when you're running a 10km, at worst you just zone out util the chapter's done. It's not like you have anything else to do. Sure, it's not optimal in terms of reading retention, but it's better than giving up completely because you can't force yourself to turn the pages.
I really do need a book in text form, because it allows me full control over how quickly or in what order I consume it. I learned a long time ago that reading books linearly doesn't work for me, so reading as I do involves a thorough look at the table of contents, then a lot of skimming and jumping back and forth to find the most interesting/stimulating bits and assembling that into a coherent view of the book.
I also listen to lectures and so on at higher speeds! People I know think I'm crazy when they walk in and hear someone yammering about some dev topic in a chipmunk's voice, but I just get so impatient with slower speech.
The advice in the article pertains specifically to non-fiction, didactic literature, and hints that most books of this nature really are full of fluff. For those there's a few take-aways that you could have gotten from a concise article, instead of getting stuck in someone's ramblings.
Don't you just scan ahead and jump to the next bit? I have a problem with doing this with novels I like, if it's getting intense then I'll want to skip/scan-read to get to the next tranche of "action". I do the same with TV/films, if there's a filler scene, just skip to the next scene.