From the course: Time Management Tips

How to deal with a reading pile

From the course: Time Management Tips

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How to deal with a reading pile

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- Processing is the act of going through each item in your inbox and deciding what you're going to do with it. Occasionally, I'll have viewers report that they run into a conflict when it comes to processing their reading material. By reading material, I'm talking about news related to your industry, books, even links to articles or a video someone suggested you watch. Many people find themselves overwhelmed with how much reading material ends up in their various gathering points during the week. Because reading is rarely considered urgent, it gets neglected and pushed off, even though it has value. What I teach people to do in my time management courses is to schedule time for reading. Putting it on your calendar to read specific material is the ideal action to take. So, if you have material that's important, you simply open up your calendar and schedule time to read it and digest it. While that's the ideal course of action, in reality, I personally have found that sometimes it just doesn't work, especially when the reading material that you're getting is of unknown value. If you don't know how much of a priority it is, how can you schedule time in your calendar? Because this is a common occurrence for most of us, I recommend that you just get faster at reviewing reading material. When I teach about processing, I recommend doing something now if it will take you five minutes or less to complete. When I get an article, I almost always assume that it's going to take me five minutes or less to read. Occasionally, I'll even set up a timer for myself to limit my reading and scanning to five minutes. In most cases, I toss the article after reading, but if the article looks juicy enough and is providing valuable information, then I'll schedule additional time in my calendar to really consider it and act on it. What if scanning through things quickly isn't your strength? The great news is there's a course right here on The Library called Learning Speed Reading. Investing an hour to go through that course will likely save you tens of hours over the course of the next couple of years. One extra tip that may not apply to everyone is something that I personally do. If you're a leader and you have people on your team who have different specialties, sometimes it's wiser to delegate the reading of an article to them. For example, sometimes I'll start reading an article and realize that it's more relevant to John, who is my project manager and graphic designer, so I'll delegate the article to him and ask him to summarize using bullet points the top three actions to take. This gets the double benefit of saving me time and helping him learn, and to improve in his position. Education and knowledge are powerful, but they are most powerful when we focus our attention on what we do best.

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