How to read at work
A guide for designers and product managers
While we don’t often think about it this way, the truth is that product designers and product managers spend much of their day reading and writing.
It’s not just pixels and spreadsheets all day. Documents atop of documents form the basis upon which we make decisions and craft new solutions.
The rich context you gain from careful reading makes you more persuasive, which is a product person’s ultimate weapon.
If you work in technology, your job involves constant reading (or it should). Product briefs, research insights, presentation decks, and executive summaries occupy our screens, seemingly without end. But it’s no wonder — in product-focused orgs, a lack of sufficient context from these docs can be crippling.
Yet we rarely, if ever, talk about this fundamental skill — reading (for work).
Reading at work, for work
If you Google “reading at work” or “how to read at work,” you’ll inevitably come across articles about sneaking in little pockets of time to catch up on the latest news, or “making sure you make time for learning,” or other results related to personal reading time.
But I’m not here to dissuade you from reading TMZ between meetings. I’m here to talk about reading at work for your job — the kind of reading you need to do, are asked to do and can help you do your job better.
Consider how only 43% of knowledge workers are clear on their company objectives for the year, according to a 2019 study done by Asana. That is a startling number, considering the tools we have at our disposal today. What the study highlights is that a lot might get lost in translation. And I’m willing to bet it’s because we’ve skimmed our way to an empty inbox, missing important context written in plain sight.
Only 43% of knowledge workers are clear on their company objectives for the year (Asana, 2019)
Just think about the thousands of dollars businesses spend on getting you to write a thing — and then think about how quickly your co-workers read (skimmed) it. Are you extracting maximum value from some of the most expensive documents your company invests in?
Reading: something we never truly learned to do
“How to read” wasn’t exactly a course offered in college (but perhaps it should have been). Unstructured reading is often called passive reading. It’s the kind of reading we sometimes do when someone fires over a document link with a note that says “FYI”. Another term we use for passive reading is “skimming”.
The reason why skimming is rarely effective is because humans almost always misjudge how well they’ve learned or improved on something, which means that when we read something once, we tend to believe that we know the material, when in fact, that knowledge is short-lived.
Think about that last time you crammed for an exam — everything in your brain accrued from that all-nighter was likely gone the moment you left the exam room.
Kudos to you if you’re an effective skimmer with a photographic memory, or you’re dialled into everything you read or study — your focus and rigour are rare. But for us mere mortals, effective reading at work will require diligence and process.
Skimming on the job
When you don’t read effectively, you’re left with fragments of information that your brain won’t efficiently store in long term memory. Unguided and unstructured reading leaves you with what amounts to zero usable context with which you can use to answer questions effectively. If you were an art student like me, you’d be familiar with the writing style — complete and utter BS’ing.
Enter the workforce — you’re headed into that meeting that had a document attached to the invite. You’ve skimmed it (or haven’t bothered to open it at all), and the resulting meeting is less than productive (I’ve just described my past self).
Imagine the valuable insight you might have offered if you had fully absorbed that product brief or project summary beforehand. Imagine the time saved if you knew that each person attending had an effective level of context.
🔬 What science tells us
“The act of reconstructing knowledge itself enhances learning.”
Doing a once-over of a piece of writing will rarely result in effective absorption. A 2011 study focused on the studying methods of undergraduate students compared four different ways of reviewing course material.
The first method is something that we’re all familiar with — students were asked to read the subject material once and then leave it (one-time study).
The second method was repetition — students studied the material in four separate but consecutive sessions.
A third method had students read the material and then construct a concept map on paper to demonstrate their understanding.
The fourth method was retrieval practice — students reviewed the material, closed their books and were then asked to reconstruct in their own words what they had studied, repeating this process twice. Which was the most effective? A week later, all students were asked to return to write a short answer test, and the retrieval practice group outperformed all the other groups.
The important takeaway from this study is not merely that one method was more effective than the others, but the nature of that success.
The students were asked to answer both verbatim questions and inference type questions (answering inference type questions requires a deep conceptual understanding of the subject matter). In both types of questions, the retrieval practice group outperformed the other groups.
In other words — the method of studying impacts not only the ability to retrieve the knowledge from memory, but it also affects the depth to which students understood the concepts.
⭐ How to read at work
If the science has convinced you, or you’re just sick of reading without retaining, it’s time to put these ideas to the test. My methods were formed after years of failing university courses and working in the field. Try these, build on them, and by all means, tell me how you improved on them.
Reading this way won’t make you a better designer or product manager — but it can enrich how you articulate and grasp the problems your business faces. I can say with certainty that being able to use the rich context you gain from careful reading makes you more persuasive, which is a product person’s ultimate weapon.
The rich context you gain from careful reading makes you more persuasive, which is a product person’s ultimate weapon.
Before you dig in, get focused — turn off your phone, any notifications, and tell everyone to buzz off for an hour. If you’re a purely digital reader, clear your desktop and close any unused windows and apps.
👩🏻🏫 The method
- Examine the table of contents, or if there is none, study the structure of the document (if you use Google Docs, turn on overview mode). Understand the big chunks of the document.
- Read the entire document all the way through without pausing.
- Now, reread it, but where you would typically highlight something, form a question instead. Write those questions down, in addition to the answers. For example, instead of merely highlighting “our core metric is to increase subscriptions”, write down “What is the core metric for the project?”. Scribble your answer in a complete sentence beneath your question. See 👇 below for a list of questions that I’ll always try to answer when reading.
- Take your questions (and answers) and do a retrieval review (more on this later)
- Repeat the retrieval review, ideally the next day, or before you have a meeting related to the document in question.
Remember that your goal is to end your reading with a list of questions (and answers). The answers to your questions should be discernible from your reading (and if they aren’t, that’s a good time to leave a comment for the author to correct that!).
❓Questions I try to answer when reading
- What is the purpose of this document?
- What is the core problem being described?
- Who is this a problem for?
- How do we know it is a problem?
- How will we know we have solved the problem?
Depending on how you read (print outs or digital), here are a few more suggestions on how to get the most from your reading.
🖨 If you print things out
- Fold the page you’re reading on its vertical axis, so you have a nice clean column to quickly write down notes as you read
- Once you’re done with reading and taking notes, flip the doc over, and you’re left with a handy guide for later review or as a basis for creating flashcards (yes — I sometimes create myself flashcards to review things before an important meeting)
🖥 If you read on a screen
- Use an app like Rectangle.app on macOS or Fancy Windows on Windows 10 to help you create a side-by-side window setup, one for your document and one for notes
- If you use Google Docs, throw up a tab with your reading up on one side of the monitor, and in a second tab, open up a blank document where you’ll keep your review notes that you can entitle something like: “REVIEWED: NAME OF YOUR DOC”
- I sometimes copy the text into a separate doc and strip out the hyperlinks (studies show that hyperlinks do not affect reading behaviour, but I, for one, am too easily distracted!)
- If the hyperlinks are important, make sure to follow up on them, AFTER you’ve completed a read of the document at hand — stay on task.
🧠 Retrieval practice: how I do it
Remember that 2011 study of students using a retrieval practice method for studying? Now that you’ve got your questions (and concise answers), give yourself a test. Here’s how I do it:
- List your questions out in an empty doc and then begin to answer those questions (without looking at your notes, of course) as accurately as you can.
- Mark yourself — find out where you fell short in your answers and then review your source material again, paying close attention to the nuances of those weak areas.
- Test yourself again, either at the end of your workday or the next day.
- Repeat these retrieval tests until you can answer each question with sufficient confidence and detail
🔴 Important note: I don’t read everything this way
This method of reading is effortful, I’ll admit. I don’t read everything in this way, but when I’m in a work context and a piece of writing slides into my inbox that I know will affect the project I’m focused on, you can be sure I’ll be putting it through its paces. For me, that means research insights, product briefs, and decks.
This takes a bit longer and requires some process. But consider the alternative of missing out on important context that you were supposed to extract from a document that someone put time and effort into writing. You may end up skimming the same document over and over because you never read it properly the first time.
Reading in the Slack generation
If you have trouble reading long documents, remember that there are forces at play shaping your behaviour.
In his seminal work, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, journalist Nicholas Carr describes our internet generation as one that embraces our natural animal tendencies towards distractedness. The short tweets, text messages and, of course, Slack messages that rule our days have eroded our ability to read deeply and make unique connections between concepts through inference and analogies.
“When we go online,” writes Carr in The Shallows, “we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”
This article is not about the distracting nature of our tech-infused world — it’s about how you might read more effectively on the job so that you can make great decisions quickly. But becoming a more effective reader starts with an acceptance of our human nature — an increasingly distracted collective of brains that forms our global online consciousness.
Take the opportunity to use that thorough reading to build foundational knowledge about the business you work in
The next time a long document comes across your desk, accept the challenge it represents — resist the urge to skim it and “know it” superficially. Instead, take the opportunity to use that thorough reading to build foundational knowledge about the business you work in. Simultaneously, you are strengthening your deep reading abilities — a skill that will ripple across an entire lifetime of words and ideas.
Questions to leave you with
What would the world be like if we all read carefully and diligently? How different would our ideas be if we always had an immense and rich layer of context to draw from? I’m as eager to find out as you are.
