Mod N Reading System
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009ModerN Reading System
Gradually I perfected my cooperative multireading technique by combining modular arithmetic with software data structures and algorithms like sets, circular buffers, priority queues and round-robin scheduling. It sounds complicated but in reality the technique is very simple and suited well to everyone who wants to learn everything at once and doesn’t like traditional a book after a book method. All books we want to read are organized in sets (here I give my own arrangements as an example):
- Commuting sets
- Home reading set
- Background office reading sets
- Lunch reading set
Every set is organized as a circular buffer (mod N). Some buffers are optimized to avoid heavy load while commuting. For example, my commuting set is split into two buffers: one is at home and another is in the office. When I leave to the office I take 2 books from the top of the example queue I have currently at home:
When I arrive to the office I put them at the bottom of the corresponding office book set. When I leave for my home I take 2 books from the top of the office queue and when I arrive at home I put them at the bottom of the depicted queue above. Thus I manage to read 4 different books every day during commuting. Sometimes I don’t have a place to sit on the train or just stand waiting for its arrival. For such cases I have a separate queue of 16 Routledge books (The Basics series). They are small and I read only one of them every day. In total this amounts to 5 different books a day and I read 4 - 12 pages from each. For each commuting direction I have 3 books (2 + 1).
Next I have semi-fixed set of books for lunch reading, usually 5 or 6 of them. I read 6 - 12 pages from each. These books are organized as a priority queue where books with more pages have higher priority. If 2 or 3 books are on the same topic they are put into a circular buffer to read one per day. In addition, I put a few magazines I’m subscribed to in a cyclic buffer too.
In addition to this, I read only one book at the time at home from cover to cover (usually in Russian). At home I mostly write books (instead of reading).
In the office I have different sets for background reading (instead of cigarette breaks I had before I quit smoking). This set of sets is organized as a priority queue with every subset having a circular structure as well if it has more than one book. One long term set with higher priority is The CRC Encyclopedia of Mathematics. Other books I read in the office include software engineering titles and for them I publish notes on this blog.
It can be boring sometimes to read the same 1,000 page books for long periods of time so I also introduce an element of randomness by injecting some recently purchased book or a book from the pool of old unread books.
It is very scalable even if you have only a few hours to read per day. Most important, it also gives a certain satisfactory feeling of having started reading all books you accumulated and provides cross-book idea fertilization and better knowledge acquisition by repetition.
Now I apply the same reading system to my renewed study of foreign languages. Currently it is German where I have 10 basic language level books arranged in a circular buffer.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to have a goal: why you read all these books.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -
