Two Useful EAP Wellness Webinars

I tend to be an eternal optimist. But I'm also a worrier. Lately, I've begun to feel the need for the EAP (Employee Assistance Program) wellness webinars offered at work. I'm a software engineer at iRobot, which uses KGA as their EAP provider.

Partly this is the pandemic finally getting to me, two years of being cooped up indoors nearly 100% of the time. That aggravated what was already a turbulent time in our country. All grist for the worrier's mill.

What do I have to complain about? Really, I have a great life, and I don't have nearly the things that are real tribulations for others. So this is definitely a case of first-world problems.

Nevertheless:

• We have an endless supply of bad news.
• There's always something at work not going as desired, something I'm not getting done or banging my head against the wall over.
• There's always something at home needing service or repair, the car, the furnace.
• There's always fretting over personal finances, costs going up, the arrival of tax season, bills to pay, retirement to save for (like that will ever happen!).
• There's always that endless thought loop of worry. What if, what if???

What finally pushed me over the edge was getting sick a few weeks ago. We had our first real snowstorm of the season here in the Boston area. Not really significant, but enough to go out and clear the driveway. I spent an hour or so working on it.

The next day, Saturday, I woke up with a sore throat. My first concern was Covid, so I found a local facility offering rapid testing and went and got a test as I tried to think through where I might have gotten exposed while grocery shopping or eating at a restaurant (you know, the worrying part). I didn't have any fever, but my throat got worse over the next couple days. I ended up taking a couple of sick days off from work.

Fortunately, the test came back negative, and by Wednesday I felt well enough to work, but was still tired the rest of the week.

So an hour of time outside during some winter weather took me out for 4 days, and kept me mostly down for a week. That was pretty sad.

I realized I wasn't getting the outdoor time that I normally did pre-pandemic. All my exercise is indoors. All my life is indoors. So I resolved to take the dog out for at least 15 minutes a few times a week. Get some air, get some sun, get exposed to the elements.

I also realized the negative mental effects were starting to accumulate. I was just feeling bad, for no real reason. I was just down. This is like the "drift to low performance" system trap that Donella Meadows talked about in her fantastic book Thinking in Systems: A Primer.

Time to do something about it. Of the things in life we can control, this is one.

Serendipitously, the company had an upcoming EAP wellness webinar. So I resolved to participate in all the wellness webinars the company offers. I appreciate the commitment and effort they've made to support their employees as people. Time to put that to use.

First Webinar

The first webinar was "Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results." It was excellent. I realized I had completely misinterpreted the title of James Clear's book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. I had thought it was about large, monumental, difficult, powerful, explosive changes. But it was the opposite metaphor: tiny, achievable atom-sized changes that add up.

So I ordered the book. I also requested a copy of BJ Fogg's book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything through KGA's bookshelf benefit.

I'm applying the advice from the webinar and Clear's book, primarily habit stacking and the 4 laws. This is definitely worth following.

Second Webinar

Yesterday was the second webinar, "Cultivating Wellbeing Through the Science of Thanks." This was also excellent. While this kind of thing can sound eye-roll-worthy, it's a very practical attitude adjustment.

Rather than focusing on all the negative things, actively focus on the good things. Those are the things to be thankful for.

It doesn't make the negatives go away, or affect them in any way. But it does affect the way your mind deals with them. It reminds you that in the midst of all those negatives crowding out everything else, there are good things in your life. Maybe very small, but there nonetheless.

There's a whole Positive Psychology study and practice. One of the items is three good things: write down at least 3 good things that you noted for the day. The presenter was very adamant that you have to write them down, not just think about them. That act of writing plants them more firmly in your brain.

At first this seemed like so much fluff to me. But then I started to think about 3 good things for the day. And it actually felt pretty good! So, OK, I resolved to do that.

I have a stack of traveler's pocket journal notebooks that I got for recording random mind maps. I took one of those to use for a daily 3 Good Things.

My guidelines for this are simple:

• Think about whatever good things were in the day.
• Find at least 3. More is fine.
• "Good things" can be anything from stupid little things that spark joy or trigger a dopamine spike, up to major accomplishments. Something that feels good, big or little.
• It can be something observed, something done, something experienced, or something thought.
• Write down a brief line about it, enough to spark the memory.
• Don't worry about keeping them in chronological order.
  
• Add more things later if they happen or come to mind. Those "Oh yeah, that was good, add that one!" moments are part of the mindfulness.

Some advice for this says to go into great detail, but I want to keep it as simple and easy to maintain as possible so that I maintain the benefit it provides. That's applying Clear's 3rd Law for habits.

For yesterday, I wrote down 12 things:

• Good yoga workout.
• Helped a new college grad with resume review and job-hunting/interviewing advice.
• Good avocado lunch salad.
• Read a few pages of Atomic Habits over lunch.
• Updated my interview question Confluence page (questions we use for interviewing candidates).
• Good EAP webinar.
• 3 Good Things is a great idea!
• Good sunny walk with the dog: bright clear blue sky, green pine trees, white snow on the ground, crisp air, smiling happy dog.
• Ducks on the pond: the emerald flash of the mallard's head turning in the sunlight.
• Did 2 easy leetcode questions (taking my own advice to the college grad about practicing coding).
• Instant Pot collard greens came out well.
• Started 3 Good Things habit.

Nothing big. Mostly just trivia. But this is for rebuilding. Baby steps. Small successes become big successes. Small positives become big positives.

Were there bad things or frustrations during the day? Yes. But that's not the point here. The good things are.

Just reading back through them makes the dopamine sparkle. That's the real benefit, like Dr. Herbert Benson's relaxation response, the brain chemistry changes to face the world, good and bad.

Using Speed Reading Skimming

One of the techniques I've been using since I've been learning about speed reading is skimming. This is surprisingly effective.

There are several variations of it. The specific method I've been using is to skim a book's table of contents, then skim its actual contents:

• For the table of contents, I read the chapter and top-level section headings.
• For the actual contents, I read each heading and the first clause, line, or sentence of each paragraph.

The content skim depends a bit on the writing style and layout. Some paragraphs might be very short, or might be only a single long sentence consisting of multiple clauses. Others might be very long, just a couple per page.

In general, I'm trying to read roughly one out of every 5 lines, or 3-5 sentences per page.

That allows me to cover 100-300 pages per hour. Make no mistake, this is not a deep dive on information; it's a sampling method. I use the pomodoro technique with it, in 25 minute/5 minute cycles.

What's so surprising about this is that despite actually reading only 10-20% of the material, I'm able to pull a good amount of information out of it. That allows me to digest a complete book in an hour or three.

This takes advantage of the fact that paragraph structure is typically a topic sentence followed by supporting sentences. The high level information is there at the beginning. That's not uniformly the case, but it's consistent enough that the overall gist of the material can be extracted this way.

While I may not comprehend 100% of the book (since I didn't actually read it), before I skimmed it I comprehended zero percent of it. So it's definitely useful progress.

Skimming works equally well with short-form content such as articles or online posts, taking just a few minutes, and with medium-form content such as entire newspapers, magazines, and journals, taking 10 minutes to an hour.

Skimming has a number of benefits:

• It acts as a first pass to prepare my mind for a more in-depth read, preloading a summary of the information.
• It provides a gestalt and context to help grok the overall material.
• It helps me quickly assess the quality of the material, for instance for a review.
• It helps me prioritize the things I want to cover more deeply in a second pass, skipping the ones I don't need.
• It allows me to quickly refresh, review, reassess, and reintegrate material I've read before.
• If I'm going through multiple books and resources, I can do a first-pass digest of all of them, then a second pass on each one subject to what I got from the others.

The ability to take repeated passes through material is very helpful for increasing comprehension and retention, making use of the brain's reticular activating system (RAS). This is something Jim Kwik talks about in Limitless (see Review: Limitless, by Jim Kwik). Spaced repetition helps overcome the "forgetting curve."

The pomodoro technique takes advantage of the primacy and recency effects of memory by splitting the activity into multiple sessions with breaks that allow the brain to consolidate information: primacy means we remember what we learned at the beginning of a session, and recency means we remember what we learned most recently at the end of a session. It's the stuff in the middle that doesn't do well, which is part of why cramming for hours without breaks is not effective.

I don't use this for everything. It's not suitable as the first pass for all material. When I'm reading a novel for pleasure, I want to savor every detail (and not get hopelessly confused in the plot and character interactions).

But when I want to acquire information quickly, it really does work. It also works well for incremental, additive understanding and reinforcement, lighting up the memory. That even works for later passes over material that I read normally the first time.

Here are two videos on reading a book a day that talk about skimming, with some slight variations and applications of the method. The first is a great short overview of the speed reading techniques I'm practicing, including skimming. The second talks about using skimming to filter the material down to the really interesting parts worth focusing on.

• How to Read a Book a Day | Jordan Harry | TEDxBathUniversity
  
• Why I read a book a day (and why you should too): the law of 33% | Tai Lopez | TEDxUBIWiltz
  

Imagine the power of consuming a book a day!

I cannot overstate how mind-bogglingly effective this is. I wish I'd learned it 50 years ago! Now I'll use it for the next 50.

Using The Pomodoro Technique

Over the past couple of years, I've been using the Pomodoro Technique more and more, for a variety of things. This is a very effective time management method.

The idea is that you set a timer for a specific amount of time to spend on something, and during that time you focus exclusively on that task. You can add additional work periods, or alternate with rest periods.

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato, and the technique is named for kitchen timers that are shaped like tomatoes. Each work period of 10-60 minutes is called a pomodoro.

I like to use my cellphone timer, the Brain Focus app, or a timer similar to this one. There are a number of phone apps similar to Brain Focus; I picked it pretty much at random from the choices that showed up.

What's nice about the app is that it sets up an alternating cycle of work periods and rest periods. I use it for studying and reading, to make sure I take regular breaks. The default setting is 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest, with a longer 20-minute rest every 4 cycles.

As I mentioned in Review: Limitless, by Jim Kwik, the rest periods are to allow my brain to consolidate information. If I'm doing some kind of physical activity, the rest periods allow me to recover physically and avoid overdoing it. Both cases allow me to put in a sustained effort that can add up to several hours.

I spend the rest period in a variety of ways, depending on the main activity and how I'm feeling:

• Doing a deep-breathing meditation, which I also covered in the Kwik review. Another common pattern I use is to count breaths to 10 (5 breaths alternating inhale and exhale, then start over; start over if I lose count or my mind wanders).
• Standing up and doing stretches to work out the kinks.
• Doing "chair yoga," simplified yoga poses that use the furniture as props.
• Doing simple calisthenics like situps, pushups, or deep knee-bends. Where the other rest activities are relaxing, this is stimulating.
• Going for a short walk.
• Getting coffee or water. It's important to stay hydrated during any mental or physical effort.
• Going to the bathroom.

There are a variety of benefits. In addition to pacing out and breaking up work and making sure I get brief rests, it enforces both minimum and maximum times.

This ensure that I at least put in some minimum amount of time for something I don't like doing, such as housework; and that I don't let time get away from me when I'm doing something I like, such as reading.

It also makes sure I address and balance the various demands on my time. That prevents exhausting all my energy on one thing while overlooking other things. Just about anything can be done in small segments, mixed in with segments of other things.

Jim Kwik Speed Reading On Mobile Devices

In Review: Limitless, by Jim Kwik, I reported how I found the speed reading method that Kwik describes to be effective. That was for printed books, where the method involves running your finger along the lines as an eye-tracking target, physically in contact with the page.

I also like to read on my Android phone and Galaxy Tablet. I have the Kindle app installed on both. But because they use touch-screens, the finger-tracking is problematic. I wanted to find a way to deal with that.

Touch Screen Pointer

It turns out to be trivially easy. Modern screens use capacitive-touch technology, sensitive to skin capacitance (they are not pressure-sensitive as people might think). This is why gloves prevent touch screens from working: they insulate the finger contact from the screen.

So simply folding a piece of paper such as a tissue, napkin, or receipt into a "pointer" that you can hold loosely in your hand under your fingertip allows you to run your finger along the screen without affecting it. Then just tap the screen with your pinky or thumb to change the page.

A pen or pencil also works as a pointer, but makes an audible tap touching the screen. The paper pointer is silent.

Kindle Setup

I did a little quick research on speed reading with a Kindle. The Kindle app provides a word-runner speed-reading method, but I don't like it as much as Kwik's method. 

It turns out there are entire religious wars over the effectiveness of various speed reading techniques. The only thing I'll say with respect to that is I have zero comprehension and retention of things I haven't read. If this technique gives me even just 10% comprehension and retention of things I wouldn't have read otherwise, that's a win. And I expect it will be much higher, especially as I gain facility with the method.

I did find a nice article that talks about how screen layout affects speed and comprehension, based on an academic study and resultant paper. The article does say eliminating subvocalization is not effective, but I disagree with that.

The article is How To Speed Read On An Amazon Kindle (or any digital format), by Jon Brooks, and the paper it links to is How physical text layout affects reading from screen, by Mary C. Dyson.

I had found the physical page layout of the Limitless printed book to be easy to read, so I set up my phone's Kindle app to be as close as possible, with a similar number of characters per line.

Starting with locking screen orientation to landscape (i.e. turn the phone sideways to wide view), these are the settings I came up with.

For Font, this screen shot shows the settings and what they look like:

For Layout:

• Margins: widest margins (narrowest text line).
• Spacing: largest line spacing.
• Columns: one column.

Under Themes, I saved the customized settings as new theme "Speed reading size".

Other devices with different screen sizes may require different settings to match that physical layout, and might also be usable in portrait orientation.

For instance, my tablet is large enough that I can use portrait, with the next-larger font, and the narrowest margins (widest text line). It also has an extra Alignment setting, that I set to right-justified (fixed line width).

Reading PDF's On Kindle

I read a lot of things in PDF format, such as e-books and Dyson's paper. It would be nice to read these in the Kindle app with these layout settings.

One thing I don't like about academic papers is the typical layout of densely-spaced, narrow two-column lines of text. I don't like that in hardcopy print, and even less in electronic form. 

It makes reading with a typical PDF-reader application annoying, complicating page navigation. The page doesn't match the screen layout at all, so requires various scrolling, zooming, and panning, very disruptive to the reading flow state.

The Kindle app also doesn't have a way to open PDF's.

There's a simple solution to both of these: Amazon provides a Send To Kindle service that both reformats a document to work with Kindle, and adds it to the device library.

I used that with Dyson's paper, and voila! The paper shows up on screen using all my speed reading settings, nicely spaced single-column layout that is easy to navigate. The screenshot above is from it.

That makes the paper much easier for me to read. As we geeks like to say, how meta and recursive!

The service doesn't work with all PDF's. I tried it with an e-book I was reviewing, and received an email indicating it couldn't be converted. I don't know what the specific issue was.

For such documents, I'll still need to use conventional PDF reader apps, which means I need to read them on the larger tablet rather than my phone. But at least I have the touch-screen management resolved.

Review: Limitless, by Jim Kwik

In the Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, the narrator says Gates reads 150 pages per hour.

I'm totally jealous of that. Other people may be jealous of his wealth, but I'm jealous of his ability to absorb and digest information that fast. That's a superpower. With it, anyone can be successful.

I'm now developing that superpower, thanks to Jim Kwik's 2020 book Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life. What's amazing is how trivially simple and effective the method is. The book is fantastic, a very easy read.

I found the book this weekend at my parents' house while visiting them in West Virginia. They were reading it as part of maintaining mental fintess in their 80's, which is what makes it relevant here.

Looking over the table of contents, I saw that chapter 14 was "Speed Reading". I thought, yes, I can use that! I read somewhere between 30-40 pages per hour.

So I read chapter 14, then used the method to read the rest of the book cover to cover. It worked amazingly well.

One of Kwik's premises is that many of our basic learning skills are things we learned at a young age, and never learned to advance them.

My interpretation of that is it's like we learned to read early in elementary school using training wheels to help, but then no one ever removed the training wheels. As we grew older and matured, we naturally improved, got better and faster, but were eventually limited by those training wheels.

Kwik removes the training wheels.

The book follows the typical self-help formula, with the author's story (the hero's journey), anecdotes about the people he's helped, explanation of why you should pay attention to what he has to say, and the actual methods and advice.

His methods are full of practical, actionable techniques. They cover memory, studying, note taking, focus, and of course speed reading (which should have been chapter 1 or 2, not 14, since you need it for the rest of the book!).

He covers the Pomodoro method for time management and to allow your brain to rest and consolidate information.

Another of his premises is that the brain is like a muscle, and skills like these are things that can be developed with practice, exercise, and proper rest, just as muscles can be developed with practice, exercise, and proper rest.

It's not that someone is inherently a fast or slow learner or reader and can never improve. It's that they simply need to be shown the methods and put them into practice, and they will improve.

I won't steal his thunder or his income by telling you the methods. The book does an excellent job of motivating and describing them, in an easy-to-follow form. I already use a few of them, so that was enough to convince me the others are worth trying.

The book is a worthwhile investment of your time and money. For the price of a lunch or two, you can use this information to truly advance your capabilities.

You might even change your life.

My return trip home consisted of two flights, an hour and twenty minutes for the first, an hour and fifteen for the second. I had brought two books by Dr. Herbert Benson to read over the trip, The Breakout Principle: How to Activate the Natural Trigger That Maximizes Creativity, Athletic Performance, Productivity and Personal Well-Being, 2003, and Relaxation Revolution: The Science and Genetics of Mind Body Healing, 2010.

I had read his 1975 book The Relaxation Response a couple weeks before (how to call up on command a calming response to counteract our reflexive fight-or-flight response when you experience immediate or long-term stress).

At the start of the trip, I was up to page 182 of the first book. On the first flight, I read the remaining 106 pages. Given that flight time includes ground time and air time, with announcements and settling in, I spent roughly an hour of actual reading time. So I read roughly at the rate of 100 pages per hour.

That's somewhere between two and three times my prior reading rate. I felt my comprehension and retention were a bit compromised, but largely just as good.

Why was my previous rate so poor? I was a victim of two common habits that Kwik describes, subvocalization and regression (i.e. backtracking). Subvocalization means "reading out loud" in your mind, effectively limited to your speaking rate.

The problem with this is that because your brain is capable of so much more, it gets bored and distracted. Reading as fast as you can while subvocalizing just isn't enough to fully engage your brain.

Then you find you can't remember the last sentence or paragraph you just read. So you backtrack, go over it again. That means your effective reading rate is even less than your speaking rate in order to get good comprehension and retention.

These are side effects of using elementary school reading techniques, the training wheel methods, with a fully-developed and much-more-capable adult brain.

For the second flight, I started the second book in the gate area. But first I downloaded the Brain Focus Pomodoro timer app to my Android phone. Why this one? It looked reasonable, so I gave it a try. I was very happy with it. I'm sure many of the others available are just as good, so you have lots to choose from.

I spent about 10 minutes reading while waiting for the flight, then during the flight, spent two and a half 25-minute Pomodoro work periods reading, with 5-minute break periods.

During the breaks, I used my slight variation of Benson's deep-breathing meditation for relaxation:

• Sit comfortably.
• Close your eyes.
• Relax your body head to toe: relaxing face, forehead, and temple; unclenching jaw; releasing neck and shoulders; opening hands; easing your back, legs, and feet.
• Breathe deeply and regularly.
• Silently repeat the word "one" on each inhalation and exhalation.

This is basically counting to one over and over, so you can't lose count, you always know where to return if your thoughts drift, and the oxygenation and brainless repetition trigger the Relaxation Response.

I'm sure I must have looked pretty crazy to my seat-mates.

In that roughly 75 minutes of reading (85 if you add the breaks), I read 151 pages of the second book. So roughly 110-120 pages per hour, again with comparable comprehension and retention.

That's huge. That's enormous. This was a technique I'd learned 3 days before and had only practiced using for a few hours.

Imagine what it'll be like after I've practiced it and built up the brain muscle over weeks and months, a year from now. I expect to improve all three metrics, speed, comprehension, and retention. So not only will I be able to get through material faster, I'll know it better.

Think what it would mean for you to have that ability. Think what it would mean to give your kids that ability.

I can't wait to apply his other methods and advice.

Read the book, chapter 14 "Speed Reading" first, and then practice that method on the rest.