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    Getting More From the Books You Read

    November 13th, 2008 by Stephen

    Posted in Books, GTD, How To -, Links |

    If you're new here, Welcome! To learn more about what this site is all about click here [link].

    Connect with Stephen at LinkedIn - Click hereProductivity Tools and DIY Calendars - Click hereI am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

    Subscribe by E-mail for updates on: Productivity methods, Lifestyle innovation, and the collaborative design of the next-generation personal knowledge management system.

    Click Here for an overview of the content. Please take a look at our sponsors. (Hosting isn't free...)
    Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

    Thanks for visiting!

    We just wrapped up the Productivity Mastermind conference call, and I promised that I would share this post by Matt Cornell that I used as a resource for putting together your reading workflow:

    A Reading Workflow Based On Leveen’s “Little Guide”

    Many of my subscribers are active readers and book lovers. My post How to read a lot of books in a short time is my most popular, and I’ve even had the pleasure of receiving surprise copies in the mail! Along those lines, Steve Leveen’s book The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life is a great meta book, and one of those “I have to give copies to friends” works that leaves a lasting impact.

    There’s a lot to the diminutive tome, but here I’d like to share his suggested workfow, an example of a specialized system (unlike Getting Things Done, which is a general one).
    Overall Flow

    Here’s the staging Leveen recommends (a “shelf flow,” if you will). The basic idea is repeated reviews over time (including during reading and after) help strengthen recall. (Note: “*” indicates my additions.)

    1. Pre-candidates list* (desired books, i.e., your wish list)
    2. Candidates library (acquired books - a Someday/Maybe list)
    3. Currently reading stack
    * Castaways*
    4. Après reading 1 shelf
    5. Après reading 2 shelf
    6. Après reading 3 shelf
    7. Living library

    Briefly, you have three concurrent phases happening: Collecting (managing your pre-candidates list, and buying from it - steps 1 & 2 above), Reading (”activating” one or more of your candidates - step 3), and Reviewing (steps 4-6). Finally, you continue to return to your living library over time, re-reading favorites, or using it for reference or inspiration (step 7). Of course if the book doesn’t pass the 50 page test (see ), it gets rejected as a castaway.

    Thanks for joining us on the call, you can learn more about this reading workflow system at Matt’s blog.

    If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink
    Warning: file_get_contents(http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://hdbizblog.com/blog/2008/11/13/getting-more-from-the-books-you-read/): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!  in /home/content/z/o/l/zoltan69/html/blog/wp-content/plugins/tiny-link/tinylink.php on line 24
    . Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen


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    2 Responses

    1. Matthew Cornell Says:

      Thanks! Glad you liked it. Love to hear how you applied/adapted/improved it.

    2. @Stephen Says:

      The podcast will be up Tuesday, I am still editing it.

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    This work by Stephen Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.