Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books
A large element of instrumental rationality consists of filtering, prioritizing, and focusing. It's true for tasks, for emails, for blogs, and for the multitude of other inputs that many of us are drowning in these days[1]. Doing everything, reading everything, commenting on everything is simply not an option - it would take infinite time. We could simply limit time and do what happens to catch our attention in that limited time, but that's clearly not optimal. Spending some time prioritizing rather than executing will always improve results if items can be prioritized and vary widely in benefit. So maximizing the results we get from our finite time requires, for a variety of domains:
- Filtering: a quick first-pass to get input down to a manageable size for the higher-cost effort of prioritizing.
- Prioritizing: briefly evaluating the impact each item will have towards your goals.
- Focusing: on the highest-priority items.
I have some thoughts, and am looking for more advice on how to do this for non-fiction reading. I've stopped buying books that catch my attention, because I have an inpile of about 3-4 shelves of unread books that have been unread for years. Instead, I put them on my Amazon Wishlists, which as a result have swelled to a total of 254 books - obviously un-manageable, and growing much faster than I read.
One obvious question to ask when optimizing is: what is the goal of reading? Let me suggest a few possibilities:
- Improve performance at a current job/role. For example, as Executive Director of a nonprofit, I could read books on fundraising or management.
- Relatedly, work towards a current goal. Here is where it helps to have identified your goals, perhaps in an Annual Review. As a parent, for example, there are an infinitude of parenting books that I could read, but I chose for this year to work specifically on positive psychology parenting, as it seemed like a potentially high-impact skill to learn. This massively filters the set of possible parenting books. Essentially, goal-setting ("learn positive psychology parenting habits") was a conscious prioritization step based on considering what new parenting skills would best advance my goals (in this case, to benefit my kids while making parenting more pleasant along the way).
- Improve core skills or attributes relevant to many areas of life - productivity, happiness, social skills, diet, etc.
- Expand your worldview (improve your map). Myopically focusing only on immediate needs would eliminate some of the greatest benefit I feel I've gotten from non-fiction in my life, which is a richer and more accurate understanding of the world.
- Be able to converse intelligently on currently popular books. (Much as one might watch the news in order to facilitate social bonding by being able to discuss current events). Note that I don't actually recommend this as a goal - I think you can find other things to bond over, plus you will sometimes read currently popular books because they serve other goals - but it may be important for some people.
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