Finding time to read in academia

One of the first research papers I remember reading was in college. My sociology professor had printed it out for us and challenged us to read it closely. It was about dual-income households in the United States and their affect on families and society. I remember it distinctly mostly because of it’s form. It was dozens of pages, it was a PDF, and it was very hard to read.

But buried in that document was full of all kinds of dense, fascinating ideas about families, parents, capitalism, gender, children, stress, and inequality. It showed me that research papers are powerful, potent containers for ideas, including the ideas they build upon, and the ideas they contribute. This first paper was one of many that inspired me to pursue a career where I could read more of these fascinating documents, and write them.

As I proceeded in my career, however, reading became less important. In academic computer science, I encountered a culture focused on the future, rather than the past. It often dismissed prior work as old and irrelevant, always emphasizing what was new. When I made time to read in graduate school, I encountered countless mentors and peers that subtly shamed me for reading, viewing it unproductive. It was something to do minimally, to check the “literature review box” necessary for a publication.

When I started as a professor, it became even harder to find time to read. Not only was I doing research, but I was teaching, and doing all kinds of service. None of them seemed particularly in need of me reading and learning, and so I didn’t make the time. And by many measures, it didn’t seem to hurt: I published a lot, my students learned, and by attending conferences, I learned some of the big ideas through presentations rather than reading.

But over the years, those initial ideas about reading kept surfacing. Good research papers shaped my ideas. They gave me tools with which to accelerate and deepen my discovery. They showed me perspectives I didn’t have, which helped me approach phenomena in new and novel ways. By not reading, I was making a bit more time for a quantity of discovery, but at the expense of the quality of my discoveries.

Since my last sabbatical, I’ve been trying to make time for reading by following a relatively simple process:

I think what makes this process work for me is that I already do a lot of the triage to decide what’s interesting to read as part of my normal research process. I’m just doing it in a way that makes it easy to quickly grab something from my reading list and then actually read.

I know I’ll never get through my list. And that’s fine. If I pass over certain papers over and over for decades, they probably weren’t that important anyway. And there are times when I’m just so hungry for more knowledge, I might read two papers in an hour, or spend more than an hour reading.

Of course, this isn’t the only time I read. When I’m starting a new project, I do extensive literature reviews and read a lot all at once outside of this process. And rather than archive all I’ve read in my PDF folders, I archive it in the form of a grant proposal or research paper, which cites all of the relevant works from the review as a reference list. All of my grant proposals, research papers (accepted and rejected), and my folders of PDFs, constitute my true bibliography.

In one sense, these two hours a week, and the occasional epic literature review I do, are my classroom, and the process above is my curriculum. This is how I keep learning, how I let others shape my perspectives, just as I do for students when I teach.

How do you make time for reading? And if you don’t, what do you think you’re missing?

Related posts:

The cycling class I took yesterday morning was kind of brutal — and not just because of the intense workout. The upper body work didn’t stop. My resistance was higher than I usually push it. With the…

The biggest event in February was held in Saudi Arabia. A country full of controversies, but also a lot of pasta. With all the problems that happened last year, nobody thought they would return to…

I touched down at Logan on Friday morning. I immediately set off for Cambridge to see an old friend for lunch. On the way, I mistakenly thought that the Red Line went to Lechmere. I should have…