Podtech: Scoble interview of Tim Ferris, author of “The 4 Hour Work Week”
If you do anything this week, and you struggle with time management, then go and watch this video with Tim Ferris. He has some very good things to say about not letting the urgency of email and digital life take away your productivity.
Book: “How to Read a Book” my summary
On a previous podcast I mentioned that I was reading a book titled, “How to read a book” which was written by Mortimer Adler. It is much more academic than it sounds, and is proving to be the catalyst in giving me advanced reading skills - most of which I hadn’t ever read.
I have only reading the first 56 pages of 350, but I have applied the wisdom in those first 50 pages and had already seen incredible results. This mainly comes from Adler’s insights into what he calls Inspectional reading, which is a process of getting to the theme and details of a book without having to read every single word. He calls it skimming, but in my mind that conjures pictures of randomly flipping through pages in a hopeless effort to find the “gems” of the book. Instead it 6 step process that is followed up by the 4 essentials questions that need answered after reading a book.
6 Steps in Inspectional Reading (a little different than book from my emphasis):
- Read the title page and/or preface (or introduction)
- Study the Tables of Contents (looking for structure to the big idea)
- Check the Index (for key words and their passages)
- Read Dust Jacket and/or Publishers Blurb
- Look at Chapters that seem to be pivotal to the Books Argument (from the general knowledge you have at this point)
- Finally, turn the pages, skimming(looking at subtitles and viewing each page quickly) and looking for lists, diagrams and interesting sections
4 Questions to Answer after reading a book
- What is the book about as a whole?
- What is being said in detail?
- Is the Book true in whole or part?
- What of it? (further study, implications, action steps)
Being the skeptic that I am I really wasn’t sure this would prove effective. So I just tried it this afternoon on a book I have been meaning to read titled, “The Starfish and the Spider”. It was actually hard for me to trust doing an Inspectional read on this book because so many people have recommended it that I didn’t want to miss anything. But after only 2 hours+ I had gone through the Inspectional Reading and had answered the 4 questions (in the books blank pages, a great way to summarize and reference the book later!), and feel like I have a stronger understanding of the book than if I had drudged through every word. Very Exciting!
I highly suggest reading “How to read a book” by Mortimer J. Adler. I even more pumped now to read the remaining 300 pages carefully so that I can grow in the discipline of reading, and to get more from it and much less time!
Audio “one to many” tool: YackPack
In “The Huckleberry Sin Pre-Episode #4” I brought up an audio one to many tool that could be used in stead of a podcast. The name of that service is YackPack. I was sceptical of it at first, thinking it was probably just another “wanna be” web service in the ever growing land of Web 2.0 web sites.
But YackPack is not only unique, I can see it being tremendously useful in situations where you need to communicate to a group or community on the fly, with audio. Now the context that I am most familiar with when it comes to smaller communities are youth ministries between 15 and 100 students. In that context there are a number of ways that YackPack could be used:
- To communicate to Parents (events, updates, details of events and activities, etc.)
- To communicate to your Volunteer team
- To communicate to your student leaders, or groups of students
Actually, most of the ideas that Josh and I had on the podcast. But here is the only catch, but it is a biggie. With podcasts, all people have to do is click on a link and subscribe through iTunes - which many of them already use and have. There is no “new” adoption of a new technology. And with YackPack anyone who is going to connect to the service has to be signed up to use YackPack. There are ways to embed “running conversations” with some YackPack features that might work well. But the hurdle of having people adopt a new tool, when they aren’t asking for one, usually ends in it never happening.
Anyways, I mentioned it on the podcast, and I am using YackPack in a couple of ways and wanted to share!
[Oh and the reason why audio communication should appeal to most guys in ministry is because they are primarily verbal communicators!]
The Huckleberry Sin Pre-Episode #4
Check out this podcast for our thoughts on how to use a podcast in a community (ie church, ministry, boy scout troop, jedi council, etc.)
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