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People who manage to read lots of books and also have children. How do you manage your day/time to do this? Please share any insights you might have.
by nafizh 6y ago
People who manage to read lots of books and also have children. How do you manage your day/time to do this? Please share any insights you might have.
- cafard 6y agoBedtime and commuting. When the demands on my time fell off, it was hard to get out of the habit of leaving books under the bed.
- stock_toaster 6y agoI read mostly in the evenings after the kids are put to bed, but I note that I watch relatively little television, which would likely otherwise consume that time.
- romanhn 6y agoAudiobooks is the only approach that worked for me. Listen when I commute, when I shop for groceries, when I do household chores. It's a pretty fragmented way to get through a book, but with a busy lifestyle, it's better than nothing! Been doing that for years. Edit: I should add that another optimization I got into this year has been to slowly ramp up the audio speed, which allows me to cover more content, albeit with some hit to comprehension, depending on book type. Currently listening to a non-fiction book at 1.6x.
- znpy 6y agodo you have an audible subscription or something? do you thing it's worth it?
- gnarbarian 6y agoI have one. It's well worth it. I've listened to more than 200 books in the last two years in my spare time. It's a skill that takes time but I absorb books just as well now via listening.
- odessacubbage 6y agotts programs have also gotten much better over the last 5 years or so, entirely adequate for most technical reading/articles/non fiction. it's an imperfect solution but it does reopen the doors to a vast swathe of writings that will likely never be worthwhile for a human to narrate.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoAside, Audible is pretty scummy. Consider a less scummy alternative like Libro.fm. - Audible's "Cancel membership" flow is multiple pages long and makes you think you've canceled it when you actually have to keep progressing through additional "I want to cancel" clicks. I thought I canceled the free trial when I hadn't. When complaining to some friends of mine, they also made the same mistake. - When you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation (I couldn't believe this when I saw it). - When your membership is finally canceled, you lose all of your tokens (you get one per month). So if you have 5 tokens saved up and you want to pause your membership for a couple months because your bank balance is low, too bad. (Note: I've since realized that Audible lets you pause your membership once per year for 1-3 months, but this is an unsatisfying solution and I only discovered it in their support forum. I didn't even see the option while canceling twice.) - Because canceling your membership has a 30-day delay that charges you once more, you're basically buying one last token that's going to get immediately deleted. This means that if you're billed on the 1st of the month but you cancel (ahem, submit a cancel request) on the 2nd of the month, 29 days later you're going to be charged one last time and receive a token that is deleted within 24 hours. I haven't used Libro.fm yet (have a sour taste in my mouth from Audible), but their tokens never expire and canceling ("pausing", in their language) membership doesn't delete tokens. I want to write a blog post that makes these points more eloquently, with evidence, but I haven't had the energy. "Wait, what if we charge people once more when they try to cancel our service?" is one of the most ridiculous experiences I've ever had. Even worse than that one time I had to cancel a cam-site subscription by uncommenting-out the <button>Cancel</button> in the html. The world is only as good as the things we choose to tolerate.
- gtirloni 6y agoWhen you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation Simply not true.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
- aliceryhl 6y agoI have had an Audible subscription for many years and I've been very happy with it.
- brightball 6y agoI’ve tried many times. Just can’t focus on the audio. I’ll start thinking about something and the next thing I know 20 minutes will have passed without hearing a word.
- AnonHP 6y agoI have the exact same issue. If it’s video, my eyes (and brain) are occupied and not easily distracted. But audio alone, unless it’s like radio where you don’t care if you miss something, has been difficult to keep attention on. Unlike eBooks, where you can easily go back by scanning with your eyes, audiobooks can only provide you a way to quickly go back in time, not context (unless the context is directly related to time, like rewinding for 10 or 20 seconds, for example). I’ve been thinking of listening to audiobooks while doing chores and not bothering about missing some words or sentences. But I’d have to choose a casual work so that I don’t regret missing anything.
- aaomidi 6y agoBy any chance do you have adhd? Because same.
- brightball 6y agoIf I do it’s not diagnosed.
- grahamburger 6y agoSame here. This is also the problem I have with podcasts.
- ar_lan 6y agoYep, I have to physically read books if I want to ingest any information from them.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoI used to retain things that I read very well. Now I'm prone to tuning out the stream of text the same way I (and presumably brightball) tune out the stream of speech from an audiobook. If I want to be sure not to miss something, I need to read aloud. :(
- baxtr 6y agoThat’s exactly what I do. And, I realized that it makes a huge difference if you buy both audio and the eBook. I love Amazon’s whispersync functionality, because it allows me to switch back and forth between audio and text. So whenever I hear something I don’t understand I read it instead.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoAfter a spine surgery, Audio books became the de-facto medium for books for me and I really appreciate the accessibility it provides. Btw, Audio books for accessibility reasons are not new, 'Talking Books' have been in existence since 1930s through specialized record players, cassettes and mail-order libraries. Here is a nice video about[1] from TechMoan and article[2] at RNIB. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiaMxU01Rrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiaMxU01Rrg [2]https://www.rnib.org.uk/reading-services/celebrating-history-talking-books/machines-bring-books-life https://www.rnib.org.uk/reading-services/celebrating-history...
- cbsmith 6y agoThat's kind of like saying, "people who are parents, how do you find time to have fun?" It is overwhelming, particularly at first, but after a while you figure out is a marathon, not a sprint, and that an important part of being a good parent is self-care. Then it's just a matter of what constitutes self-care for you. Getting good sleep, eating healthy, getting exercise, socializing with friends, watching movies, having date night, and yes, reading books are just some of the activities that might be considered self-care. You figure put how much time you need to allocate to self-care to be a functional parent, and then you figure out how to carve it the time. All of that is hard a heck, but you figure it out eventually or you fail miserably at patenting. In that context, reading books isn't much of a miracle or particularly impressive; it's just a choice of what works best for you.
- gitanovic 6y agoI as a parent can understand that, but what it was asked is how to read a lot of books if you have kids I think the answer is: you have to decide what activity you want to trade for that.
- TuringTest 6y agoIn the modern world, isn't that true for any activity you want to do a lot? Children or not?
- jeromenerf 6y ago> an important part of being a good parent is self-care Kids (also) learn by example, by imitating their parents doing their own things. So, not only self care, but also your things. Obviously, common sense, a toddler requires more attention than a teenager, won’t read nor play piano right away. Some things, like playing music, cooking (and for whatever reason, vacuuming) seems to have early impact :)
- aqsalose 6y agoThe other way I have heard the same idea, but phrased with slightly different motivation: Your children are important part of your life, and you are important part of their life (especially in the early years). This has also an implication: Who actually is this person they get to know? I don't have kids, but coincidentally discussed these kind of childhood memories with my spouse quite recently after someone made similar complaint. I probably hsve no idea of time commitments required of very small children. However, about at the age we were old enough not to be disruptive (if supplied with reading material when necessary), both our parents took us to their adult things: bird watcher society meetings, social events, art museums, bookshops, and seminars. It is probable our parents did their peronal own things less than they would have if we had not existed, but we agreed we did not suffer from it, and learned quite a deal. There is anyway the peculiar something about way kids' experience thing and what of them remain when we grow anyway. Undoubtledly I have learned things much useful I don't remember much about, like how to walk. For me, the images I can call up are the odd, random, small ones. To a child many things are novel in this world, and one knows there is lots of things in adults' world to uncover. Yet because of that lack of perspective, various things may be treated as the normal. As an added complication, one's perspective on childhood memories changes and gains different color when one grows up. Once, while visiting relatives on a road-trip, tthere was half a day long detour to see an exhibition of non-figurative sculptures whose details I don't recall. I do remember the calm, cool, air-conditioned atmosphere, the white bright walls, the smell of the museum, and the impression of uncanny puzzlement and imcomprehension left by the lone melancholy video installation in a small, separate darkened room in one of the exhibition halls. I was about 12 years old and quite bored. I surmise I was brought along mostly because father wanted to go, maybe because he wanted to give me educational experience about modern art, but most certainly there was any no other option suitable for preteen's inclinations given the circumstances of road trip, and as I said, he wanted to go. Nevertheless, despite the boredom, today the memory certainly is far more interesting than what I recall of the most of the kid-oriented activities I liked then better and also took lot of my parents' time. It is difficult for me to judge the value of that museum experience -- is it because of the exhibition was remarkable or does it feel remarkable because I remember it? It might even be a partially constructed memory from several similar museum trips. And after all, the thing I remember especially well, much better and concretely than anything else, one of my earliest childhood memories (that I have photographied evidence of), is something utterly mundane, namely the large, black, late 80s mat we had on the living room. In retrospect, it was horrendously ugly on its own right as soon as the TRON aesthetic went out of style, but the reason I remember it was that it had this repeating, neon-colored rectangle pattern, rows and columns, one symmetrically after other. To my eternal dislike, the pattern repeated regularly until it did not: the final row of rectangles at one end were shorter than they should have been given the rest of the pattern. No matter how I counted or measured or tried to mentally rotate the damned thing in my head, there was no solution, no escape, the thing was always asymmetrical. (I amuse myself thinking this may have something to do with me deciding to study math and CS in university later.) Thus one of possibly life-defining experiences was the rug my parents bought years before I was born, and presumably thrown away while I was in primary school (it disappeared and I never inquired about it). Of childrens' fiction authors, I think ones such as Roald Dahl, Dickens, Lemony Snicket, maybe Rowling (the very first chapters of Philosopher's Stone) capture something of this aspect to watching the world unfold.
- akudha 6y agoI know of audible and chirp books. Any other service that you can recommend?
- newbie578 6y agoI am shocked to find out that no one in in this thread mentioned Scribd. Scribd is the go to place for audiobooks, it is the only major subscription service I regularly pay. Audible is horrible, their business model sucks, and what sucks even more is their scummy marketing. Scribd is basically the Netflix for books, and I honestly love it and cannot recommend it enough. I do think it has way more potential to become something if it integrated with other services even better, but I guess working with publishers is not easy...
- tvanantwerp 6y agoI don't even have kids yet and I'm also only able to complete books via sped-up audiobooks. It's a really great way to get through them. For fiction, go for something with a professional narrator. Jim Dale's Harry Potter series is a good example. They can make it into a modern-day radio drama. But for non-fiction, I prefer if the author reads it. Authors imbibe an excitement to the reading of non-fiction; professionals often come across as monotone and I can't focus on them.
- badconvincer 6y agoMy wife takes care of the kids and she doesn’t work outside the home so both of us have plenty of time to read books.
- narenst 6y agoI have a toddler at home. I purchased a kindle a few months ago and it has drastically increased my reading time. I try to carry the kindle around the house instead of my phone. And read whenever I can - 15 to 30 mins chunks. I also read in bed before going to sleep and the backlit kindle is great for that. Also I have been renting kindle books from my library. Very easy to try books and continue reading only if I find it interesting!
- scruple 6y agoHow does renting Kindle books work? I'm intrigued.
- eej71 6y agoOur local library makes it pretty easy. Ours works through an app called Libby that connects with my library card and I then download books to the kindle.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoI also recommend Libby. It used to be Cloud Library with our public library but they phased out of it and it’s Libby now. I like it much better. They also have audiobooks.
- kqr 6y agoMy son is still an infant, and sometimes things (teething, stomach aches, who knows) keeps him from sleeping. The Kindle makes it much more tolerable to walk around and rock him at night. Of course, it also helps that my employer will reimburse any book purchases I make.
- a_bonobo 6y agoIt did plummet from about 100 books to 40 per year. For me the key was a) getting an ebook reader so I always have books on me and b) commuting instead of driving to work, that's an easy 90-120 minutes of reading per day. The Goodreads reading goal used to help too, especially planning to write a small review with notes to myself forced me to read more actively. The pandemic lockdown has broken that though, I've lost all will to sit down and write.
- scruple 6y agoI have twins, they're toddlers. I read at night before bed. My reading hasn't slowed from before kids to after kids. I average 2-3 books per month and I am usually reading two books at a time. I am reading exclusively on my Kindle right now, though I plan to get back to physical books as the twins age (I don't want them to confuse reading on a Kindle with tablet media consumption). We'll see what happens when they're older...
- jacobolus 6y agoI have read thousands of kids books in the past 3 years. Does that count? Edit: more seriously, by age 3.5 or 4 kids can understand a huge variety of material, and there are tons of books that are fun for the whole family to read aloud together.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoDesignate one day as a zero screens day. No phones, no tablets, no computers.
- briangray 6y agoI read a lot in my teens, but was never good at it. Computers have always held my attention better. I've gotten much more into reading _after_ having a kid because I wanted them to love books and be better at reading then I am. Started by reading to my kid before bed. Even at a really young age when the book didn't mean anything, it still seemed to calm them. It allowed me the opportunity to A) read anything I wanted, B) build a foundational hobby over time, and C) spend time with my child. They now bring me books (usually whatever story we're reading at the time, but occasionally a short kids book) and I make a point to take a break and read to them. Because of that and other events this year, I've been able to complete dozens of books.
- abrookewood 6y ago15 minutes at bedtime every night, plus any time I'm commuting. I think having an e-reader with back light helps, because you can read without disturbing anyone else in the bed and they are thin enough to carry anywhere.
- pewpew_ 6y agoThis is my solution. 15-30 minutes before bed and maybe another 15-30 minutes in the morning on the weekends before the kids rush our bed around 7:45am. I'm using a Kindle Paperwhite.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoDisclaimer: My kids are 10 and 12, and so don't need constant attention, and they've always slept quite well. Set aside 30 minutes to lie in bed and read before going to sleep. This also feels as if it has the effect of helping me to get to sleep faster. This is my target, which I only reach occasionally. The hardest part is consciously de-prioritising whatever it is I'm doing at 30-minutes to sleep time.
- baud147258 6y agoWait for your children to grow and leave. Or work part-time. That's what my parents did
- Brajeshwar 6y agoI have two daughters (4, 12). Here is how I do, copied verbatim from a previous discussion on HN[1] I don't have strict rules, methods, or patterns. However, I follow common themes such as skimming (or speed-reading) boring/mundane sections, change books and come back later, read multiple books at a time. Personally, I feel something missing if I totally skip something, so I tend to or try to finish what I read. I was known to be that kid who read Newspapers top to bottom of all pages, so that is that. My tricks; - Don't drive, get an Uber and read. I have finished so many books inside an Uber car. I'm in India and is cheap to get a private driver, the monthly cost pays off with the amount of things you can do in the back of your car, reading books is one. - If I'm flying, I finish about 2 typical books per leg of the flight. - Always have your Kindle or a Book with you. Read instead of looking at your phone. ;-) - If you have kids, read (physical books) to show them that you read, they will follow. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357932
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> Always have your Kindle or a Book with you. Read instead of looking at your phone. Counterpoint: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.kindle https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.kin... You can get a lot of reading done on a long subway commute. But there's no reason not to do it on the phone you carry with you anyway.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoThe counterpoint is that it’s unlikely you’ll switch to replying to poorly thought out comments on hackernews, for an example, when you’re on a dedicated reading device than when you’re on just another app on your internet connected attention thief of a device.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoThat is a reasonable concern, but it varies based on the person. I'm not worried that I'll suddenly start browsing the internet while reading on the subway. It's not at all unlikely that I'll suddenly interrupt my reading if I'm messaged while I'm on the subway, but that's something I consider desirable, not something to be avoided.
- k_sze 6y agoThis thread deserves to be an Ask HN submission of its own. XD
- stevekemp 6y agoI understand a lot of people are exhausted, especially when there are multiple children involved. But reading books has never suffered from parenting for me. I wake up at 6AM and spend a while reading on the sofa, before our child wakes up. On an average day, pre-covid19, I'd spend time doing the morning routine (eating breakfast, getting dressed, taking the child to daycare), then I'd sit on a tram/bus for 30 minutes to head to the office. That time would be spent reading. Lunchtime I'd usually read a book while eating a sandwich, then again reading on the bus/tram back to the house. Before sleeping I'd read for 30-60 minutes too, unless I was watching a film with my wife, going to the pub, or doing something else. But even on very busy days I'd always have around and hour of commute time, on public-transport, to read a book.
- kevindeasis 6y agoIn 2019 I've read 100 books. Im not married nor have children, but I might have advice to share If your goal is to just finish a book, you can listen to an audiobook at 3.5x speed. Some books are easy, some books are hard. If you pick easy books you can go through them much faster You have to pick your goals and priorities about what you want from the book. I mostly read non-fiction books that are not heavy in academics. So most of them are not written to be lean if you know what I mean Being able to tell people I've read 100 books was pretty cool but it was just a vanity metric to boost ego. It's pretty dumb to be honest. Theres better ways to consume a huge amount of information. This doesnt apply to domains that require deep knowledge/learning ie: programming, engineering, sciences, math, algorithms, hobbies, etc. Also things you learn from books are not a rule of law, which Ive noticed that is something people tend to forget.
- ramraj07 6y agoThanks for pointing out the fallacy of trying to read 100s of books, seems to come next to trying to read infinite jest just to check a mark or brag about it. The reality is that the majority of non fiction books are written by authors with perverse incentives - as a writer you can mostly make money by writing a complete book, whether or not you have a books worth of things to say about the topic. My approach has been to try and read 1 or two books a year but make sure they matter. The few books I do read, I remember most of their good parts and find them valuable and rewarding. Almost all of my friends and colleagues who are self proclaimed voracious readers never seem the wiser from it, not like they can recount any specific instance of a book affecting their life or decisions in any way at least. All of this is about non fiction of course, fiction books are a whole another animal!
- kevindeasis 6y agoI agree completely with most of what you said. The whole system of making books having a minimum number of words doesnt help at all. And I agree with the fiction part, I know and have witnessed people who have been reading fiction throughout their whole life. As an adult, they enjoy and can easily finish a fiction book in one day. But most of them cannot do the same with non-fiction books. I am at the opposite. I can go through a non-fiction really fast, but would take forever and rarely enjoy reading fiction. I do notice that too, that some books have really valuable insights and can kinda stand the test of time. Some are just like iterations of multiple books out there thats just retold in a different way
- jusssi 6y agoWe put the toddler to bed at 8PM, which leaves us with 3 to 4 hours of time at home, during which we have to avoid making much noise. At the same time, I'm too exhausted to do anything productive (actively learning new stuff or coding for-fun projects), and I'm finding media and games much less satisfying than before. As a result, I often spend my evenings reading (fiction, mostly). I'm probably now reading more than ever before.
- taneliv 6y agoI have four kids, who are now teenagers. On average I think I've finished maybe ten or twenty books a year, by reading them on my work commute. I'm lucky to live somewhere this is possible and comfortable. Some books I've finished on vacation trips, but basically almost none at home, except in the two or three last years.
- coldtea 6y agoWhen the children are babies or much later? If they're above 4-5 years old, it's simple: don't devote all your free time to your children, and suffocate them in the process...
- edanm 6y agoEchoing everyone else, but, audiobooks. I read/listen at anywhere between 2x to 3.5x speed, depending on the book and the narrator. If it's nonfiction, it's usually on the higher end, and if it's fiction, usually on the lower end, but again, it depends on the narrator themself. In addition, I read when doing everything. Exercise? Reading a book. Washing dishes? Reading a book. Commuting to work? Reading a book. A regular-sized book is between 10-20 hours of listening time. If you listen at 2.5x speed, that's around 7.5-12.5 hours-ish. If you commute 30 minutes a day each way, and only listen in your commute, that's already a book almost every week. Add in doing chores, exercise, etc, and you're getting a lot of reading time. (For the record: 2 kids ages 2 and 4, and I read about 90-100 books a year, ranging from short books to long epic fantasies. But I also listen to podcasts quite a bit so that cuts down "reading" time as well.)
- ARandomerDude 6y agoI have a big family including several young children and still manage to read about 25 books a year. My method: we got rid of our TV a few years ago. I know that is a well worn statement on HN, and probably comes across to some as a virtue signal. That's not my goal, just relating an anecdote. But no TV is strangely freeing. To those thinking about doing it, I'd say unplug it and put it in the closet for a few weeks and see what you think.
- mbrundle 6y agoSimilar to this. Have three young kids. Don’t watch any tv, Netflix, etc. Every chance I get (e.g. before going to sleep, on the tube), I read books on the kindle app on my phone. It’s surprising how much you can get through as long as you’re consistent. Phone particularly helps when trying to read when lying next to a kid at bedtime to get them to sleep, can still read under the covers in the dark with the backlight.
- paganel 6y agoSame thing here, though we don't have a kid just yet. In my case the TV cable decoder just stopped working for whatever reason a year and a half ago and I never really managed to call the TV cable company to tell them to come and fix it. I can still watch football (soccer) matches by casting from my computer to the TV and we do have a Netflix account (which we don't even use that heavily) shared with a close friend but that's about it. I can confirm that the change for the best has been considerable.
- TheCondor 6y ago+1. If no TV is “too far” then limit it to 1 hour and only watch things you love, you will surprised how little that is. Dig in to the screen time metrics too, you can probably Twitter and Facebook less than you do, you can still see pictures of your mom’s dog but not lose hours to it.
- hrktb 6y agoThis feels powerful in a world where TV consumption is already on sharp decline, yet you managed to move a few floors deeper in the historical entertainment stack. No TV for us just meant playing games elsewhere (not complaining either, just a matter of preferences)
- inovica 6y ago25 pages in the morning and 25 pages at night. Done it for years. I have 2 kids. Its not always exactly these numbers, but its not far off and I try to keep to it.
- wheels 6y agoI read novels aloud to my children at bed and nap times. This started after reading Alice in Wonderland to my one year old and realizing that a kid who couldn't talk yet obviously didn't care what I was reading. At this point my kids are two and five, and my older son is approaching the point where he'll be able to follow longer books and I'll shift to things he understands, but I've read about 15 novels in their entirety to the kids thus far.
- shard 6y agoI leave a book in the bathroom and never bring my phone with me into the bathroom. It's not a very fast way of reading but I do finish a book every few weeks. I prefer paper books because I underline important points which I then summarize into notes.
- dawidw 6y agoKids in beds at 20:00 should give you 3-4 hours for yourself.