The Barbell Method of Reading

URL: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/

The Barbell Method takes this into account by integrating your reading habit into your knowledge work with two steps:

1. Read the book. Read swiftly but don’t skip any parts unless they make you vomit or put you to sleep. Mark all the passages that stand out and contain useful, interesting or inspiring information.
2. Read the book a second time. But now you read the marked parts only. This time you make notes, connect them to past notes (Zettelkasten Method!) and think about what you’ve read. Make mindmaps, drawings, bullet points – everything that helps you to think more clearly. (View Highlight)

The quality of the book will now determine how much time you invest in it. Sometimes, a book is not that important and only provides a few shallow pieces of information. The second step could only take a very short period of time. But a good book is dense. I remember that the second step for Antifragile by Nassim Taleb took me more that twelve full deep work days (spread over six weeks) to work my way through. Other books took only half an hour for processing, though. (View Highlight)

A text consists of four different types of parts:

1. Useful and difficult to understand. You want to process these parts heavily for understanding and exploitation. Mark these for later.
2. Useful and easy to understand. You want to process these parts heavily for exploitation. Mark these for later.
3. Not useful but difficult to understand. You actually don’t want to process these parts but you don’t know if they are useful. Sharpen your mental theeth with them and then ignore them after you found out that they are not useful.
4. Not useful and difficult to understand. Ignore these. (View Highlight)

When something is useful yet easy to understand it is an opportunity to produce and go with the flow. Write a lot! (View Highlight)

I never rely on any author’s own interpretation of his work. (View Highlight)

I could just refer to his book. But this would be pretty shallow processing. Good processing is to go to the primary sources and read them. (View Highlight)

I developed a theory of conflict, interlinked it with my previous work on depression, self development, history of nobility and more. This is a product of deep processing and never happens with shallow processing. (View Highlight)

True reading is not a passive process in which you just create an influx of information. It consists of deep processing, thinking and writing on what you have read and interconnecting it with you already know. (View Highlight)

Note:: Have a conversation with the text. Challenge, expand, push back, summarize it, say it differently, have an opposing view point to challenge your own understanding.

Only the three parts combined, reading, thinking, and writing, produce a true change in your brain and make you a better thinker. To write about what you read is important even if you don’t aim to write books on something. Still, you have to write if you want to think properly. Still, you have to write to process information properly. (View Highlight)

Note:: Oh this is good. I usually feel like I have to write a full article or something to actually “write” about something. But, I like his argument here. Writing makes us slow down, really think about and engagement with the information. That is processing. Actually, I guess that is part of processing - oh! I just did it there! I thought: that is processing - then my brain said, umm is it? Is that all that processing really is? No. You, as mentioned in the previous paragraph check other sources, develop different arguments, create different view points…and write. That is processing.

Diffuse thinking also is part of processing. Walking away from the information. Or, rather, loading the information in your brain, then walking away. Do something else. That is part of processing also.

• Optimize the amount of information you process. You should read a lot.
• Produce an archive which consists of true knowledge, not just a collection of half-understood bits of random points.
• Learn to think deeply and thoroughly by making it a habit to practice it. (View Highlight)

Note:: Collector verses producer and thinker. I can read a TON, highlight a LOT of things that are just sitting in my PKM, but that is not helpful or useful. Engaging with the information and thinking on it, generating output or change, that is the point.

Don’t practice shallow processing. But process deeply and practice deep thinking. (View Highlight)