Positive Feedback & The Boredom Filter

As a readers, we want to play the long game.

It matters a lot less how much or what you read TODAY and a lot more what you read over the next months, years, and decades on your life. So it's rarely worth it—except when absolutely necessary—to force yourself to read boring stuff.

Boredom is a powerful signal of several possible things: (1) you're too tired to do the reading, (2) the text is irrelevant to your purposes, (3) you don't understand what you're reading.

Also, by ignoring reading, we are increasing the chances that we'll burn out and stop reading altogether.

For a similar idea, see this excerpt from this MetaFilter thread:

I've learned to STOP reading BEFORE my brain starts fogging over. If that tends to happen after ten minutes, I stop reading after eight minutes. If I keep reading into the fog -- or, worse, try to push through it -- the fog gets even thicker the next time. In fact, there may not be a next time. I probably won't return to the book because I associate it with fog and frustration.

...[Leaving off while fresh] makes it easier to jump back in next time. It leaves me with a cliffhanger. My brain WANTS to resolve it. ...[Charles: This is what Hemingway did to make sure he wrote everyday—he'd stop BEFORE he was burned out.]

I've found that the fog is a very reliable message from my brain telling me to STOP. Actually, it's telling me that I should have stopped earlier, and that I'm now doing damage. ...The good news is that if you quit while you're ahead, you'll find that you can gradually read for longer and longer periods. Your brain starts trusting you not to fatigue it.

Also, from How to Take Smart Notes:

A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on. But if we feel constantly stuck in our work, we will become demotivated and much more likely to procrastinate, leaving us with fewer positive or even bad experiences like missed deadlines. We might end up in a vicious circle of failure (cf. Fishbach, Eyal and Finkelstein, 2010). Any attempts to trick ourselves into work with external rewards (like doing something nice after finishing a chapter) are only short-term solutions with no prospect of establishing a positive feedback loop. These are very fragile motivational constructions. Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward (DePasque and Tricomi, 2015).

So, if you're here to read and read a lot, we want to design the reading process to be intrinsically rewarding.

I think this is fundamental, and more important than any other question of effectiveness or efficiency—if it's not intrinsically rewarding, you're not gonna do it. And if you're not gonna do it, it's neither 'effective' nor 'efficient'.