Appropriate action is great and everything but reading makes decision making easier.

The challenge lies in starting to act, even knowing that your skill and knowledge can always be improved, but that starting in an imperfect way is better than waiting for the ultimate perfection. Which we all know never comes…

While it might be unproductive to multitask multiple mental tasks, a mental and a physical can easily be performed together. Many athletic events certainly require a real-time blending of both.

Any reduction in efficiency of multitasking compared to single handling is hugely overshadowed by the overall increase in efficiency. If you score 1.0 for doing a task by itself, but two tasks done together are reduced to 0.9 each, you’re way ahead at 1.8, meaning your overall return from multitasking is 80% higher. If I read while on the exercise bike, I may not pedal as hard, and I may not read with as much concentration, but I’d say that it’s only about a 10% difference for each task compared to single handling. In fact, I sometimes feel I concentrate better at reading while on the bike. So I’ll glady take the gain.

Maybe it just takes practice. I’ve been doing this kind of multitasking for over a decade, so it’s second nature.

If you do other activity while you’re reading, your brain has difficulty to stock informations and think about it.

Even if you are better than others in multitasking, your brain will be more efficient while doing only one activity at the same time.

I use reading as a mental warm up for the day and it really helps me make decisions faster and with all the extra data, hopefully better.

I have looked into it, but haven’t fully committed
myself to it. Do you have any techniques
(and/or books/programsw) that’ll help me read faster?

Listening.

It seems to me that the first skill one must master is the ability to read (speed x comprehension = ability level). Committing to a book a week and excercising reading skills is a great first step.

The second skill, which follows reading in my experience, is the ability to write. Keeping a journal or your thoughts, a blog, or taking notes of your reading material are natural next steps. What are your opinions on this? Aside from this blog, what other types of writing do you prefer?

Lastly, it just occurred to me that speaking might be the natural third step… can you form clear, concise thoughts and then convey them to others in an efficient way?

Are there other steps which I just haven’t thought of yet?

About 1/4 of the books I read are fiction. Some are fictional philosophy or spirituality like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy books, but most are just pure fiction. Last year I read Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series (7 books), which I really enjoyed. I also liked The Da Vinci Code. Usually I read several fiction books in a row and then go back to nonfiction. Whenever I feel my imagination is getting stale, I know it’s time for more fiction.

Also, I was curious if you read fiction in your book-per-week program. You talked about absorbing new ideas, but I would think there’s value in reading fiction as well.