A more productive way to read about productivity.

[Potatoe]

I've had the Blinkist app for a few days now, and I'm really enjoying it so I figured I'd give them a mention. Basically think of all of the countless books that you've been recommended about business, productivity, the mental game, all that stuff... think Tim Ferris, Seth Godin, Dale Carnegie, the whole gang. Chances are you don't have time to read 100 books, and reading instead of doing starts to get really counter productive at a certain point.

What Blinkist does is they condense those books into a few quick slides, so you can pick up all of the major ideas from any given title in about 10-15 minutes. Obviously if a topic really interests you or you want to go deep, you'll want to grab the full book - but with a lot of these kind of books, I find that the author will spend a chapter talking about something that could be summed up in a couple of paragraphs. I don't read these kind of books for pleasure, so I don't need to know every little anecdote or detail, so I find this app to be awesome.

I'm sure there are a lot of similar services, but I haven't dug too deep yet. I found Blinkist via an advertisement on my Instagram (So... those work sometimes.) Also found http://readitfor.me which starts at $30/mo - haven't given them a try. Blinkist has a plan for around $5/mo and $10/mo to have it read to you + export to Evernote and a couple other features (Paid yearly.) They've also got a free trial that lasts for 2 or 3 days and frankly that's plenty of time to make a pretty big dent.

Anyways... Just thought it was kinda cool, somebody might find it useful. If you've got a huge stack of business books on your to-read list, you can plow through a good chunk of them in an afternoon and decide which ones are worth delving into further.

TLDR: TLDR.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I like the idea of condensed business books. I've seen a lot of youtube reviews that condense it as well. The problem is, all that fluff that I can't stand in business books are the very thing that help me remember the lessons. For me, I don't do condensed versions any more, but I'll gladly take advantage of audiobooks so I can keep learning in the car and at the gym, etc. But I definitely still prefer to pick up a classic paper book. The level of focus it takes to keep chewing through that format ensures you're paying enough attention to learn it. Audio is the runner up for me.

 

[Kevin]

That doesn't work for me. What does, is not reading too many business books. The vast majority are forgettable or iterations on a theme that can be found better elsewhere. I used to get some weird sense of status from how many books I read, which makes no sense to me now. Now, I only care about how much value I can extract out of reading. And that tends to come from less books, better books, and going deeper into them.