Nate Tilley describes a system for reading faster: listen to the audiobook at high speed to decide if it's worth buying, then skim key chapters, annotate the physical copy, and synthesize notes into a Google Doc. He converts 8-10 hours of reading into a concise reference he can reuse and revisit.
There are so many books out there, it's not even funny. Typically, I like to get the audiobook and crank it up on high speed in the beginning to see that's worthy of my time and my attention. I'm not the kind of person that's like, oh, I've started reading this book, so I must finish it to really stop myself from wasting a lot of time. I will get it on audible. You know, I'll skim through a few chapters to say, okay, this is worthy. Then if it's really great, I buy the physical copy of the book, I highlight it and I take notes and I dog ear it and I mark it up. And then I have a running Google Doc that has my notes on that book and I put it in there. I can access that information now, but I have just spent, you know, eight, 10 hours synthesizing that knowledge into wisdom. And I want it as a fast reference point that I can then go to my Google Docs and go bang, get all the good stuff out of it and apply it. Because I might be applying some of that now, but I might want to revisit that in a year.
