3 min read
“How To Read Textbooks Faster, And More Optimally”
Introduction
Reading textbooks for your classes is hard. It takes time, effort, and lots of more time.
Trust me. I know how that feels. Every time, I would rather prefer doing anything else over reading several dozen pages of a textbook in order to complete an assignment or prepare for a test.
So, my goal with this post is to simplify that as much as I possibly can. What you’re reading is my optimal strategy for reading textbooks (or even not opening it at all), yet still effectively consuming all the information presented in the text, line-by-line, and retaining nearly all of it. What I’m about to present has taken me years to perfect, and hopefully, it’ll be just as useful to you as it was for me.
The Traditional Method of Reading Textbooks
Normally, you’re taught to just read and annotate. Highlight things you think are important and relevant to what you’re learning (which is a lot more than you would think), and absorb as much information as you can in as little time as possible, because why not?
Of course, both you and I know that those are awful expectations. The last thing I want to do is read, especially read something that makes my mind unhappy, messes with my mood, affects my schedule, and just gives me more useless, pointless, busy work to complete. No one likes that.
What You’re Taught Won’t Get You Far
Sure, you could dive into the content you’re learning by annotating, underlining, highlighting, circling important words, comparing and contrasting two concepts, and summarizing every paragraph in your own words (after reading it). But, here’s the crazy -and really interesting- aspect of doing all that:
It takes an ungodly amount of time to do. By the time you’ve reached the third page, you’ve spent nearly two whole hours; and you haven’t eaten nor slept yet, with your bedtime approaching in just three hours. What kind of “efficiency” and “effectiveness” is that?
The truth: there is none.
Following the traditional advice that everyone tells you will just have you ending up in the same spot as them. You’ll have work to do every single night, and not enough time to do it. With these expectations, you can expect to study every weekend, lose lots of time that you could be spending on higher ROI tasks (or even enjoyable activities w/ friends and family), lose your sanity within just a few weeks, and experience an ever-increasing dependence to score better on tests, quizzes, and assignments.
You’ll end up being locked and chained to your academics, without a way of escaping beside giving up the habits engrained into your mind.
Traditional Method vs. Optimal Method
What I’m going to teach you in the next section are two methods:
- The first one involves still reading the text, but reading so little of it that you end up saving almost 90-95% of the time that you would spend attempting the traditional method, while still scoring just as well, if not, better.
- The second method involves not touching your textbook at all. This’ll make sense in a moment. But, yes, it’s possible – and the time you’ll save? Incalculable (kind of).
My goal from teaching you this new, more optimal method is to save you time, and teach you that even while applying a lower input, you can still achieve the same output that you usually achieve from doing more work. Remember, more work doesn’t inherently mean that you’ll do better – don’t believe that BS.
How To Read Textbooks Faster
Method #1: Reading The Textbook
This first method demands most of your attention to go towards higher ROI tasks such as assignments, personal tasks, research, and anything that can be done independently (because independent work is the best opportunity to discover new information that you didn’t know previously, and answer all the questions sitting in the back of your head).
Now, as for the time that you’ll spend reading, what you want to do is:
- ONLY READ WHAT’S USEFUL. Seriously, don’t read any small details. Only briefly note a couple of details (3-7 ideally) per concept, and no more. Doing anything more will just have you annotating a majority of the text, while not actually learning anything.
- DO NOT ANNOTATE. Instead, take notes on a separate document. These will make your notes easy to locate, and easy to navigate when you’re preparing for a test.
Method #2: Not Reading At All
This is a privilege that students just a few years go weren’t lucky enough to have access to. Nowadays, there’s so much technology in your available toolset; that with its proper leverage, you can earn whatever grade you want – while minimizing your effort like crazy.
Before, method #1 (what I mentioned before) was the fastest way to actually read a textbook, consume its content, and simultaneously avoiding heavily reading it. But, now that method is outdated. Now, there’s better methods, methods so good that it almost sounds too good to be true – but here’s the neat part: they completely real.
The Method Protocol
Here’s what this method comprises of specifically:
- Gain Background Knowledge on whatever it is that you’re learning. But keep it VERY basic and generalized. For example, just recall the names of certain events or important figures if you’re taking a history class.
- Conduct personal research + answer personal questions. Of course, you could do this with Google, or Bing, and just research and research, and continue all day and night. But, again, that’s not efficient. And if the method was something that could be replicated 5 years ago, it probably isn’t the best method for you to follow. So you’re still going to research, but simplify it with a tool that everyone should be using (and that you’re probably already using): that being Artificial Intelligence.
- Specifically, you want to use an AI-powered tool optimized for research purposes that won’t make stuff up on the spot, and even root back its research to reliable and trusted sources. A really good model that I’ve recently started using goes by the name of Perplexity AI. It released around the same year as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and it’s seriously good with research. Just type in whatever query you want answered, and it answers it just. like. that.
- Assemble your research into a document of notes + for assignments and other tasks. While you use these models, and do your research, I highly suggest completing your assignments at the same time because of how convenient it is and because you’ll be able to get two priorities out of the way at the same time.
Conclusion
I wanted to keep this post short. So if you found it helpful; feel free to share it with someone you think isinterested in learning how to better read textbooks. And, if you have any other methods that you believe could be as useful similar to the two optimal methods we provided, please let us know! We’re always open to suggestions.
