For any new piece of content I want to engage with - listen to an audio version of it first
This is often sufficient to get what I was hoping for from a piece ✅
If not - it serves as a first-pass skim read before deeper engagement
This is one of the core pillars of my reading flow — I think reading things in audio form is underappreciated.
Audio form dramatically extends the range of environments and situations when it's convenient for you to read.
I listen to audiobooks, podcasts and TTS version of articles when I bike to places, do chores and sometimes even while taking a shower (though I've been avoiding the latter lately).
This allows me to read more - in fact it increases my reading throughput to a degree that I can first-pass read things faster than I find new things to read!
Read it once mindset
An important stepping stone to make audio form work well for me was overcoming “only read a given thing once” mindset.
What I mean by that is that when I originally started using TTS to read things - after listening to an article - I felt like "I read this, I'm done with it an and don't need to engage with it anymore".
I was doing a kind of symbolic representation of reading
And while it's actually true for many types of content (opinion pieces, news articles, fiction) - I found it that for deeper, more technical pieces - just listening to something once, often wasn't quite satisfactory. I wanted to highlight paragraphs, add notes, play with presented models.
As a consequence I was avoiding listening to all content as I had a vague sense of unease "but what if it's a piece I want to engage deeper with and by listening to it, I'd lose an opportunity to derive full benefit from it".
Eventually I realized that it was silly 🙃
My new process is:
listen to all the content that comes my way first
this is sufficient level of engagement for a large chunk of what I want to read
for things that need deeper engagement
put them on top of the queue of the to-read things
read them again (likely in text form this time), highlight and annotate them, play with models they present, find follow-up reading
Spaced Repetition reminds me to engage with the piece until I mark it as fully processed
I've been previously using a custom automation setup that allowed me to create a podcast feed of transcribed articles from things saved to Instapaper (https://github.com/Stvad/pollycast/ ).
I've since transitioned to mostly using Readwise Reader TTS.
The reason for having custom setup was a better UX for playing audio inside the podcast apps and a better voice quality. Reader TTS got both of those things to a "good enough" stage.