Hey, Luca here! This is a ๐ weekly essay ๐ from Refactoring! To access all our articles, library, and community, subscribe to the full version:
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About two months ago, I got into a quest to completely revamp what I read, and how.
Reading is a big deal for me. As a full-time writer, good reading enables good writing, and in turn, business altogether.
This is not some kind of epiphany โ I have known it for a long time and I am grateful to have developed disciplined routines over the years. I have also written about them at least a couple of times:
But while the output of my readingโarticlesโis very public and works as an accountability device to force me to think through things, reading itself is private, which means it is more fragile and itโs where I tend more easily to become sloppy.
How do I know? Well, itโs easy. I mostly read articles through the Readwise Reader, where my highlights get synced on Notion. If I open my Notion list and see the proverbial rolling tumbleweed, it means I am not doing good.
I have also found that less time spent reading strongly correlates with more time spent on social media, namely X. And I have a love-hate relationship with X: 90% of my feed is trash, but the remaining 10% feels genuinely useful. So, a net negative overall, but hard to let go completely.
All in all, whenever thereโs higher pressure at work, or in life, quality reading is one of the first habits to take a back seat.
And thatโs bad!
So how could I get back on track? And in a way that works for the long run?
Thatโs what I asked myself in September. Then I did a few things, and they are working very well. So letโs go through them!
๐ฏ Goals
Working top-down, I asked myself what I wanted to achieve through an updated reading workflow. Here are my answers:
Stay in touch with what matters to me in tech โ which is news, opinions, and new tools. More on that later.
Store ideas and resources in an effective way โ for the long term, so I can reuse them for my writing.
Delete X from my iPhone โ and get those 45mins / day back.
I quickly figured out that:
#2 was already working well, so no need to make big changes, and
#3 was strictly dependent on #1. If I achieved #1, then #3 would easily follow (spoiler: it did!)
So, next, I polled the Refactoring community about their favorite readings, and got a treasure trove of sources (thank you so much folks ๐).
I put everything in a spreadsheet, and tried to organize stuff by category, which made me ask the following question: