7 Actions for Consuming More Books (to Learn and Improve Your Life)
Books are a great way of learning and improving your life, but it is all too easy to down-prioritize them to spend time on more urgent, but less impactful things. In this video, you will find my 7 actions for how to be more intentional with consuming books and making sure that you get it done as much as you want.
Intro
Okay so first off i want to explain my weird choice of word when i say “consuming books”, instead of the good ol’ “reading books”, and the reason why I use this is simply because I want to include listening to audiobooks here, this is a very good way of consuming books, as i will argue later in the video, and I want all everything I say in this video to apply to you wether you read, listen or do something else to consume books. Why are books good for learning and improving your life?
So why are books good for learning and improving your life in the first place?
The way I see it, it is because: throughout human history, many people have lived, and many out of those people have developed great ideas and skills. Now a common thing for people like these is to focus a big part of their entire life into developing this idea, or learning this skill, and after that, condense all this knowledge as good and clear as possible, into a book. Now this is great news for you and me, because thanks to all these amazing persons, you and I now have the opportunity to sit down on our sofa or wherever we want, and get all these amazing ideas served to us on a silver platter, easily understood within minutes or hours, what might have taken these smart-ass people a lifetime to gather.
And the subject could be whatever you want, like relationships, science, how to manage your personal finances, or beekeeping, but no matter which one, most likely, since this Gutenberg guy invented the printing press like 600 years ago, and humanities could start writing books easily, someone have most likely already thought about this much more that you and I have, and written a book about it, from which you can learn a lot of ideas that you can take with you and improve your life.
Regarding my own life, I have been reading quite a lot of books, and I believe that this has influenced my day-to-day thinking and decision-making quite a lot, and has given me new productive perspectives in many different areas of my life that I consider important, for example:
Human psychology and relationships, how me and people around me work. Productivity, how to know what I want to get done and how to get it done. What I believe to be “right” and “wrong”, and morality and how I want my actions to affect others, and all that kind of good stuff. Facts about the world. How I manage and plan my personal finances.
This was just a few examples of areas that i think is important in my life and that i want to have good ideas within.
My list of books that I have read and want to read:
I also want to add that I will be focusing on consuming book as a means to become smarter and more knowledgeable, usually by with non-fiction books. This is one reason to consume books, but there are of course other good reasons as well, for example it can be relaxing, or you can feel joy in getting caught up in the story, and while I personally read for these reasons from time to time as well, learning valuable ideas from books is the part that I am the most passionate about, and what this video is about.
So let me now move on over to the main part of this post, which is my own ideas on how you can be more intentional and effective in the way that you are consuming books, which I have divided into the following 7 actions that you can take, and I have ordered them by how important I think they are, with most important first:
Action 1: Make it clear what books you want to read.
So if you want to consume more books, there has to be actual books that you want to read in the first place, so let’s get specific on which books there are that you want to read. There are a lot of good books out there, and many of them are probably able to change your life in the best ways if you read them, but chances are that you don’t know about them, and they are probably not gonna find their way into your life by themselves. So the first step is to go out looking for the books that you want to read.
The key to successfully doing this action is simply to keep a “want-to-read” list. And as soon as you hear about a book that you want to read, you just add the title to this list.
Having this list is great for bringing clarity to what you actually want to read, but one more step that you want to take is that you want the list sorted based on how much you want to read the book. This might seem small but I think it is quite important because when this list grows bigger it will be hard to find the books that you really want to read among the books you only just might want to read someday.
What you need then is a digital program where you can keep this list and where it is possible to add a score to each book in the list, and then to sort the list based on it. Unfortunately, a regular note keeping program like the standard “notes’’ app you might have on your phone will probably not suffice for this. What you will need instead is some sort of spreadsheet-structure like excel or google sheet. I use a program that is called “Notion”, which has this spreadsheet structure and also other things that I use to organize my digital notes. I can highly recommend Notion and you should definitely check it out if you are interested, but I won’t go more into detail on it now.
Here you can see what my list looks like, you see all the titles, and you can also see the score that i added from 1 to 10, and the list is sorted so that right now you only see the ones with highest score. And all of these books are books that i am excited about reading and I will probably read quite soon.
What you should do then is simply: to each book that you add to the list, also add a score between 1-10, representing how good you believe the book will be, or how much you want to read it, and then have the list always sorted according to that and have the books you want to read the most on top. It is not that important that you get the score “exact”, just pick a number from 1-10 that feels good in the moment, and this will capture the majority of what you need.
What you can do then is that each time you want to start reading a new book, you just look at the top of this list, maybe the top 15 books, and get a feel for which one you want to start right now. This makes it extremely easy to know which book to start next, and with this you will also be very confident that the book you start reading actually is a book that you really want to read, and not just a book that you happen to come across at the time when you want to start a new book.
If you already have a list similar to this then you are well on your way, but if you don’t, then fear not, do me a favor and devote 15 minutes to creating one and start to add books to it right after this video, and you will have gotten a long way. Pick a place where you can have this list, create the list and google “top books on …” for a lot of different subjects that you want to learn more of.I will also link to my list of the books I have read, ordered by how good I think they are.
Action 2: Listen to audiobooks
My second action is to listen to audiobooks instead of reading physical books. If you in the end still prefer to read then you should do that, and all my other actions are equally relevant whether you read or listen to books, and the important thing in the end is that you actually get the consuming done. Which that being said, here are the advantages with audiobooks that i want to highlight:
Reason 1: You can do other things while you listen
It is possible to actually do something else when you listen! With reading, you have to give the book all the full attention of your eyes, and your eyes are arguably your most important sense, so you can barely do anything else while you read since you need your eyes for most things, and you are pretty much obligated to stay completely still.
If you listen on the other hand, your eyes are completely free to do whatever they want to, which opens up to a lot of simple activities. Now this is according to me a VERY big difference, think for example off: Walking + reading: chaos. Walking + listening: easiest thing you have ever done
Here is a list of activities that you can listen to audiobooks, but not reading, while doing:
Chores like: The dishes Laundry/folding clothes Cleaning the house Cooking/preparing food Gardening Doing errands/shopping
Any type of workout or similar Being at the gym Running Stretching Walking Walking the dog you can do both: Waiting for things: like on trains, planes or in cars
Being able to consume while I do other stuff, and not having to dedicate a “timeslot” for it is very valuable to me, it is almost what I always do nowadays, and it makes me consume a lot more books. Personally I do it mostly when being at the gym and when i am on my way, walking or on the bus to some place.
Doing these autopilot activity that you can multistask can often be boring, so listening to an interesting audiobook at the same time usually makes the activity better, making it a complete win-win situation to multitask it.
Reason 2: Hearing a voice makes it easier to get engaged
I believe that hearing an actual person’s voice makes it easier to get engaged and inspired compared to reading. I think that is is much more common for me to end a session of listening and thinking “damn im intrigued, i cant wait to listen again”, than to feel similar when im reading.
I think that a good analogy is calling someone vs texting someone, I do text people a lot because it goes fast and you don’t have to wait for the other person to be available, but if i would really want to understand someone and discuss something important, then I would prefer to do it over a call than over text messages. With a call you get more details like the tone of voice of the other person, and it feels like you are “closer” to each other.
I think this also holds for books, because they are actually the same thing, with just the limitation that in books, it is only the author who can do the communication.
I believe that getting engaged both makes it more fun to consume, and that it will help you with understanding and remembering what you consumed.
Reason 3: It is a little bit easier to bring wherever you go
It is not particularly hard to bring a physical book with you, but it is even easier to bring a digital book, whether it is audio or e-book, by just having it in your phone and headphones.
Closing thought:
I think that reading is so popular because for a long time, this has been the only way of getting other people’s ideas without meeting them in person, with audiobooks being a relatively new invention. Because of this, when we think about books, we still automatically connect it to reading, which made sense for a long time when that was the only way of consuming a book, but not anymore when we have the audiobook technology. Since audiobooks have so many advantages, I believe that this will change, and here you have the opportunity to be an early adopter.
Action 3: Know when you are consuming books
So to read books, you will have to dedicate time to doing it, which is a shame, but it is time very well spent. So let us not think of what time this is exactly.
So when do you want to read these books? Maybe you prefer it on the weekends when you have the time? Maybe while you are commuting, on the bus or train? Maybe you want to multitask and do it when you are working out or doing household chores like laundry, cleaning and cooking?
I think it is productive to see it as you have 2 options:
Option 1: only reading
Dedicate time solely for reading
Option 2: multitask
Do this while already doing something else, aka multitask, this option has a lot more openings if you listen instead of read, as I mentioned before.
Now think this through and decide if you want to if you want to go for option 1 or 2 or both, and decide on actual times in your day to day life that you want to do this, and write this up in your calendar or something to make sure that you will remember it and that you are explicit about it. because if you are not explicit on when you should do this, it is very easy to forget about it and dont get it done at all.
Action 4: Make sure that you have a good speed
This one is quite easy to understand and explain, but still a bit controversial, and that is to make sure that you have a good speed.
As I said before there are a lot of good books out there, so the way I see it we are not really “book constrained”. Motivated by this, it would be great if we could make it less effort to complete a book, and there is a great way of doing this, and this is by increasing the speed.
For listening, this means using a program that can alter the speed of the audio and choose it intentionally.
For reading, this means learning how to read faster.
Whichever one you do:
Increasing the speed will make the “cost” of reading a book, aka the time spent, much less. For example, listening to a book at 2x speed will make it “half-price”, aka you only spend half the time that you would otherwise need, so it is twice as easy to read the book, and throughout your life, you will have read twice as many books.
This do however, impair your understanding of the material, which we of course is bad, but i believe that the loss of understanding is minimal if you do this correctly
In the end this is a trade off between understanding you get, and the time spent, and in theory i guess this could be any speed, both 100 times faster than you are used to, and also slower than you are used to.
For me, I don’t believe the sweet spot is at the regular 1x speed most of the time, but instead somewhere around 2x speed. I feel like when listening to 2x speed, I might have 95% of the understanding that I get for 1x speed, which makes it worth it to take 2x over 1x for me. I also think it is a good idea to change this depending on the book and situation, if it is on a subject that you just want a high level understanding of, and lower it if you really want to remember and understand the details, and if you multiask you might want to have it lower compared to if you give the book your full focus.
So make sure to utilize the fact that you can change the speed and find your sweetspot, wherever that is!
How to “learn this”: If you want to change speed, it might be harder in the start and you have to “learn” it.
Learn how to listen faster: Most listening apps such as spotify and podcasts apps have the functionality to choose the speed that you are listening at, and this you should use to your advantage. Learn to listen as fast as you are comfortable with, and by slowly getting used to it, raising the speed slowly over a few weeks. I usually listen to 2x speed, which I am very satisfied with, and feels natural.
Learn how to read faster: There are good guides on the internet to learn this, with tips like, don’t jump with your eyes, practice not stopping and going back with your eyes, practice actually reading fast and you will learn. links down below.
Action 5: Make sure that you know where to find the books that you are and will be reading.
One potential blocker for reading is that even though you know exactly what books it is that you want to read, you can not, or don’t know how to access these books. This can be relevant both when you want to start on a new book and don’t know where to find it, and when you are already reading a book so you know how to access it, but you just didn’t bring it with you.
Now this is best solved by foresight and planning,
For physical books, this could mean that you always buy the top 5 books that you have on your “to-read” list before you want to start them, so that you always have 1-5 of your next books at home somewhere so that you can pick a new book up exactly when you want to. And then when they are almost finished, you do the same thing again.
If you use audiobooks or e-books, it is a little bit easier because you can just click “buy” or “download” in your phone and then you have it.
Here it is a good idea to look beforehand for where you can get the books from. There are multiple sources to get them from, and I will list some of them, but not all sources have all books, so put some time into looking for where you can find your top books and write it down so you know when you want to start it, you can add this info as a “tag” in your list.
Some good places to find books are: Audiobook Stores like: Audible, storytel, nextory, bookbeat costs money, but this is money well spent imo, but you can also utilize “free trial” on all of them. Sometimes you find it on Spotify, so if you have spotify then this is “free” Youtube, i find some of mine there actually Pirate bay/ download in some other way, thrifty Librivox: sounds good in theory but i usually don’t find the books that i want to read. Speechify and use pdf, i have not used it but my friends recommend it, might be good. Kindle, I don’t use it personally but I think it is good.
This makes it so that when you are out and about and finish a book, you can start a new one immediately without having to research where it is available because you already know where to find it.
Action 6: Summarize your books
Each time I’m done with a book, I write a short text on it, to summarize it, and give some personal evaluation and takeaways from it, and put this text document in a folder with my other book summaries. I do this mostly to reflect one last time on the book before I leave it for another book, to make sure a take with me as much as possible from the book, and also to remember more from it, but also save the text so that I can come back to it and read my thoughts on it, or if I want to pitch some friend on the book I can look back at the summary.
This action I feel like can be easy to get motivated to do in the moment of hearing about it, but then you don’t really get the habit because it is too much effort. So to compensate for this I usually do this summary with quite low effort if i feel like it, putting maybe 5 minutes on it.
Action 7: Score and keep track of all the books you have read
Another action to remember what a book was about, a necessary step before that is to remember that you actually read the book in the first place. For this I highly recommend that you, similarly to the sorted “books-to-read”-list that i recommended you keep, also keep a sorted “books-that-i-have-read” list, where you sort it based on how good you thought it was. If you look at this list from time to time, this will greatly help you remember the books, and also what they were about, especially your favorite ones, if you look at the top of the list.
Here is the full view of my books lists, where you both see the list that i showed before with books that i want to read, but now also with the list of books that i have read, and again it is the same structure, but the books i have read also have this new score for how good i thought the book actually was, and sorted it on that.
This is great for remembering the ideas, but also great for talking to people about it. Something that has been bugging me before is that when I want to tell people about good books I have read, but before I had this sorted list, I could never seem to recall the books that i really liked, or maybe after thinking about it for a minute, i recalled one book that i read that was quite good, but not at all my favorite. But with this list I just pull up my phone and see the complete list of books that I read, and can tell anyone about any of the books and what they are about.
Final words
That was all I wanted to say in this post, take away as much or little as you want from this, but I really hope this inspired you to consume more books! If you want to help me then i would love it if you told me your favorite books so that I can add them to my list. Hope you enjoyed this!
