is your question more about how to get through your schoolwork/lecture notes, or how to work on reading for pleasure? the tactics end up being different but both will end up centering around removing distracting and forcing yourself to focus, preferably also gradually increasing your attention span.

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>>34964983
Greetings. Let’s say that my priority at this moment is reading for pleasure. How specifically would I go about that?

Cheers,
burghur

>>34964976
read at night. Breakdown the content, ask yourself what each piece of information ends up being useful for. If you still can't focus, skim to get the whole picture first, as applications rise the need you will come back to the specifics.

The bigger problem is the education system. Each time you read the book you find something different to interest you, so you will never get it by just passing it once.

>>34965005
If you read for pleasure watch many movies first, find out about production, then go to books and read about the author and the historical context before jumping into the book.

>>34965005
i tend to find it very helpful to read multiple books at once. i like to have multiple nonfiction titles in circulation as well as one novel, something like books of poetry or plays, some short essays or stories, and art books to flip through. that way whenever i start to feel exhausted by a topic i can simply switch to another one and feel reinvigorated. when i get burnt out by too much data absorption i switch to fiction. when i find the narrative doesn't capture me, i switch back to learning about something.

i also find it helps to have multiple formats. that way when my eyes are tired of staring at pdfs i can switch to an audiobook or lecture series and continue doing other things. i'm doing that right now while typing, listening to a lecture series on american involvement in warfare from the revolutionary war to the iraq war. it's some great courses series by the former nato supreme allied commander europe. they also tend to speak very slowly so i keep it sped up. it's at 2.15x right now but that's slowed down because i really wanted to pay close attention to the lectures on grenada, panama, and kuwait. when you use audio like this you can multitask easily, even being able to do physical work or get errands done, but some people like to split hairs on whether this really "counts" as reading or not. and when i want to get away from screens in general, i can retreat somewhere to go read a physical book in silence.

all of this allows you to get through massive amounts of information in a relatively short time period and solves the problem of feeling like you're forcing yourself through a text that has become a chore. just switch to something else and then back and forth whenever the mood strikes. when you get deeper into the works you tend to build momentum to finish them so you switch less anyway.

if it's been a while since you've read at length, it can help to build up the length and complexity of what you're reading to build tolerance.

>>34964976
Find a book with exercises and problems, do them. A problem-centric approach, instead of mindlessly (re)reading the text. Just skim, or even skip, the text, and go straight to the problems.

try an exercise -> refer back to text for new definitions/formula/theorem/etc. -> attempt the exercise again -> give honest attempt, say for 30 minutes -> check the solution if available -> move on to the next exercise

If it's too difficult, try easier books. Perhaps even do books that teach the prerequisites. For example, a book about linear algebra, or basic DSP, or something else.

If your text has no questions at all. You need to create the questions yourself, and review them. But this is easier said than done. Better to just find something with questions. Although for some advanced enough subject, such books may not exist.

Writing your own textbook is also useful. Just open a latex file, and try to explain everything in your own words.