How do you manage your reading time?

Hey, this question is for you effective readers out there (notice I didnā€™t say regular readers). You know what? I really want to read butā€¦

  • So much going on at work just focusing on testing
  • Outside of work, I tend not to do further exploration of testing myself (currently I have been learning more about SpecFlow, but this is my general pattern)
  • Books can be thick, hard to extract wisdom from. I read, I forget.
  • I do have a list I want to to get through (for example, the famous Agile Testing book)
  • There are interesting blogs tooā€¦ now that will add more seconds and minutes to my time wouldnt it? Maybe I should follow just the important ones. So many though, mozilla, Google Chrome, latest trends in webā€¦ (recommend me some!)

Sorry about the stream of consciousness, where were we? Ah yes. Soā€¦ how do you manage your reading time? Most importantly, how do you read to get the most from a book?

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In general whenever there is confusion personally it helps to write down things.

Try it out. Any kind of writing helps - just speak your mind and at the same time write it as personal note ( I use Evernote). Why you want to read, what goals do you want to achieve, which books or blogs align with it, where are you at currently, etc.

Good idea, but itā€™s actually better to use real paper and pen rather than apps.

I tend to ignore things that I write down in digital format, but lately Iā€™ve been practicing writing down tasks and goals on paper that I keep on my desk all the time. It helps me keep important things in sight, and there is some enjoyable feeling when I finish something and cross it out in list with a real pen.

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Iā€™ve taken to carrying a physical notebook with me to jot down ideas, lists and drafts of stuff to go online later (though that doesnā€™t always happen).

As for reading itself, I usually manage perhaps an hour between getting home and starting to cook; and at least ten minutes before I turn the light out at night. At weekends, if I donā€™t have any other commitments, I may have an hour or soā€™s reading Saturday and/or Sunday morning and perhaps another twenty minutes/half-hour after lunch. During the week, lunch is an opportunity to catch up on some blogs and other online stuff. One or twice a month, I attend an evening event and so have to have my evening meal out; I take a book along so I can have thirty minutes or so over coffee before the meeting. And if Iā€™m travelling, then I see that as an opportunity for some real reading time!

Sorry it took me a billion years later, I do agree with you and I am late in the game of writing things down. It is so important to do this because now I can share my writing via a blog with team members. In turn, they give me feedback, they learn and I also get new insights. Posting and responding in The Club is writing (duh).

Anyway, I want to know, what do you write about and more importantly how do you gain insight from what you write?

I agree with you but writing with a pen is so slow, I even learned shorthand for a little bit but it looks ugly as hell even if I can write faster. That discouraged me from writing with a pen and I went back to typing. But then that got too annoying and I bought a voice recorder.

Now I find I have more flexibility, I donā€™t trap myself to ā€˜pen is bestā€™ or ā€˜typing is bestā€™. Itā€™s whatever gets you doing the task of communicating your thoughts. There are some days where I want to feel the pen on paper and other days where I just want to speak.

Anyway, how have you been getting on? Have you carried on with your approach?

Sounds really good Robert, if you add it up all your time spent then Iā€™m sure itā€™s a lot more than the average joe. Youā€™re certainly beating my recording of zero minutes a day. How are you doing? Are you still keeping up with that schedule? Any blogs you recommend?

Well, of course COVID-19 and working from home has changed all that. My reading time is now twenty minutes or so over my breakfast coffee and similar at lunch-time, plus perhaps 30 or 40 minutes after I stop work to come down from that. At night, given that Iā€™m going to bed later as I donā€™t have to get up so early to physically commute, Iā€™m having a good half-hourā€™s reading each night (though sometimes I find Iā€™ve read the same page three or four times, which is a sign that I should put the book down and turn the light offā€¦ :slightly_smiling_face:)

As for blogs: well, on testing, I take my cue from the MoT blog feed for testing blogs (under ā€˜Newsā€™ on the top menu). I have a few blogs that I follow, mainly from friends who write about their own writing, or their photography, or whatever. For just great writing about life and Liverpool, I recommend Ronnie Hughesā€™ A Sense of Place (https://asenseofplace.com/). I have my own blog, Steer for the deep waters only (https://robertday154.wordpress.com/) for all sorts of general subjects, and Probe probare (https://wordpress.com/view/probetesting700171536.wordpress.com) for testing matters. Though COVID has so disrupted a lot of other things that I havenā€™t added much in the way of posts recently.

This seems to be a case of FOMO which I also had.

  • So much going on at work just focusing on testing.
    Try to make your workplace let you learn something. If you arenā€™t learning new things or solving new problems, then consider looking for another job.

  • Outside of work, I tend not to do further exploration of testing myself (currently I have been learning more about SpecFlow, but this is my general pattern)
    Again, your work should give you most of the experience you need.

  • Books can be thick, hard to extract wisdom from. I read, I forget.
    Try video courses also. More importantly, practice what you learn ! Before you even begin learning, ask which project you could build with the learning. Solve little tasks which use the learning. Otherwise, youā€™ll never remember anything. Being good at 1 or 2 things is better than reading 10 books & remembering nothing.

  • I do have a list I want to to get through (for example, the famous Agile Testing book)
    That book is on my list too for a while. You can read the condensed version first to see if youā€™d even like the bigger book https://agiletester.ca/agile-testing-condensed-a-brief-introduction/

  • There are interesting blogs tooā€¦ now that will add more seconds and minutes to my time wouldnā€™t it? Maybe I should follow just the important ones. So many though, mozilla, Google Chrome, latest trends in webā€¦ (recommend me some!)
    I donā€™t follow any blogs anymore. I only look for information which I need. There is too much info on the internet, a lot of which is opinionated, wrong, plagiarized or simply cr@p.

I faced these dilemmas too. Now, I just focus on core testing principles and I set clear learning goals. I treat most other things as noise. There are too many people writing blogs, articles, posting on twitter, linkedin etc. Many of them are just peddling stuff or promoting things peddled by their connections. I am quite sure most of them donā€™t even vet the stuff they are promoting most of the time. Its likely that youā€™ll end up overwhelming yourself and end up wasting your time if you try to learn everything. Iā€™d suggest that you make small, realistic goals, put them on your calendar and start working to achieve them. Look at job postings and maybe even apply occasionally, even if you arenā€™t really looking for a job. That might help you to get a better idea of what to learn.

That advice is golden and exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you so much, I loved how you broken down each point here and blasted away my worries.

FWIW if you use an ebook reader, then a few of them of them allow the user to highlight passages. This is way quicker than note taking and means that you can read through text and highlight interesting bits without much break in your reading flow. Then after youā€™ve finished you can go over the things youā€™ve highlighted, and think about them more, or research them more.
I find this works for me.

Thanks Kris, it sounds like you have a kind of system to internalise what you learned. Iā€™m curious, what do you do with the highlighted sections usually? Do you reread them? Make your own notes on them? It would be good to know. I do have calibre on the computer and fbreader on my phone. But I havenā€™t done much reading on testing lately, itā€™s mostly reading fiction or something.

Good question Philip. At the end of the book, I look through the things Iā€™ve highlighted and think about why I highlighted them, or maybe just do some extra research. I can then discuss these things Iā€™ve found interesting with colleagues, or at meetups, or with friends, or online forums. And if something comes up that I need to know at work, and I can remember Iā€™ve read about it (but canā€™t remember the exact details) then I can just refer back to the highlighted notes.

The great thing is that with my ebook reader (I have a Kindle), if I donā€™t have time to read some article at work, then I can download it from the web, save it as PDF then use Calibre to convert it to .mobi. Then I can sync it and read it on my Kindle and highlight bits/make notes.

I donā€™t do this with fiction really (apart from I used to do it with interesting words and I found it helped my vocabulary).

And youā€™re right, it does come down to having a system to internalise what youā€™ve learnt. This just comes over time and practice. 10 years ago I would have never even thought of doing this. I had no problem reading, but just keeping stuff in my head was a problem. In your OP you put ā€œBooks can be thick, hard to extract wisdom from. I read, I forget.ā€ It made me laugh, as this was exactly what I was like!

This technique intrigues me so I will definitely need to try highlighting stuff. The only danger is I need to control myself not to overdo it. Otherwise I may highlight too many things and it defeats the purpose. How can I stop that? I wonder if itā€™s easier if I set myself rules for what I highlight. For example:

  • It must be interesting to me personally
  • It must be practical OR I can find a way to make it practical
  • It will still be relevant to me a year from today
  • I can see myself teaching this to others

I have a kindle too but compared to a table or a pc, itā€™s slow at highlighting. Iā€™ve kind of given up on it and the only time I might use it is if I decrease my screen time. Iā€™m glad you laughed at my post!

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Best of luck with your ā€œreading timeā€ journey! Those rules sound good. 3 of them anyway.
The ā€œIt will still be relevant to me a year from todayā€ rule:

  1. hopefully you wonā€™t need content to be relevant in a year from today as you would have progressed so far in one year that what you read and learnt a year ago will be elementary to you,
  2. the other 3 rules cover that anyway. If you find something it interesting or personal it means its relevant to you. If you find something practical in it, then it means itā€™s relevant. If you can teach it to others it means its relevant.

One of the things Iā€™ve done for a few years now is to write a review of book Iā€™ve just read - whether for learning or for pleasure. This started out as something I did using my online book catalogue, LibraryThing (www.LibraryThing.com), but those reviews were only seen by other LT users so I started cross-posting to a dedicated reviews blog. Some reviews are short, and not all get cross-posted; but the process helps my own understanding and can often uncover all sorts of spinoffs in terms of ideas that I didnā€™t imagine when I first read the book.

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I use Audible and use the relatively long commute time for reading errr listening to books.

IN the morning usually non-fiction.

On the commute back home, if It was a hectic day or for whatever reason Iā€™m not in the best shape to process information I usually listen to fiction, or some music to unwind with Spotify.

That gives me easily 90 minutes of daily ā€œreadingā€ time.

I recommend you google ā€œCommonplace bookā€.

Also, there a few solutions out there to export those highlights (say from Kindle) into text or Evernote, etc. so theyā€™re more easily accessible.

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