Print out the good articles you really want to read
My experiment that says you probably won’t finish this unless you print it out.
Can you get all the way to the bottom?
I know it sounds cumbersome and comedic. The look on your face right now probably resembles my colleagues’ faces this week when I printed out over 300 pages of articles (granted one of them was Peter Hamby’s 95 page dissertation) and plopped them on my desk.
Like most people who enjoy reading, I use one of the many “save for later” applications that stores articles in an archive. Currently I use Pocket. The idea sounds good and I certainly store tons of articles on a regular basis. However, I never, ever read them. They just pile up.
So after a year of procrastination, I decided it was due time to clean out my archive and read them all. But this time, I would read them how I love to read: on paper. Here’s what I learned:
1. Printing can suck.
I’ll try not to make this sound like a Pocket advertisement, but I initially began by printing out articles from their actual web pages. What a mistake. After one article produced 10 pieces of blank paper, I downloaded the Pocket App for Mac and printing became a breeze. Their interface and engine prints articles beautifully and simply. Much like Medium, the spacing, fonts, and stripping of distractions made readability top-notch. This turned out to be a must for my experiment.
2. I read much more quickly offline than online.
In two months, the Amazon Kindle will be 9 years old. And while it brought books to the masses and made reading cheaper, some argue that the distraction of the web has left our comprehension at a disadvantage.
One of the greatest delights of this experiment for me was the crystal clear efficiency. By day’s end, I had finished more than half of the stack I printed out (some 160 pages). In contrast, my control experiment was the dozen or so times over the past year I desperately tried to accomplish the same goal but on-screen. I locked myself in the same small conference room and could usually only get through one or two articles, and at a snail’s pace.
The problem is, as an online marketer, my job has a lot of scrolling feeds and blinking lights. Between email responses, Tweets, and Slack messages, there is an onslaught of on-screen attention that is constantly nagging me with “but you could be doing this instead…”
This makes sense, though. Study after study shows that online media inhibits reading. Researchers have found that every image and hyperlink your eyes interact with while reading online causes neurons to flare. This is because the brain senses there is a decision to be made. Reading becomes harder, and therefore longer, the more media-layered an article is. The brain is constantly evaluating which path to take next: “Do I keep reading? Do I look up what this word means?”
3. I actually read… and enjoyed reading.
Think about the concept behind Pocket or any article saver. You are saving an article because you cannot read it right now. Presumably, you are working on a project or something more important than idle reading. However, if you have the type of profession that does not allow for reading a short article at any given time, the likelihood that you will ever carve out additional time to read them is probably low. It’s not impossible, just hard.
Take into consideration the elusive nature of digital stacks of things. A “like,” “retweet,” an email — they all represent push notifications that disappear at will. They are collections of things with no depth and are thus easily forgotten. Like a bag of apples — if not in plain sight or part of a routine, they will never be eaten. The stack of paper cannot be ignored.
Actually picking up your reading is one thing. But if you don’t enjoy the experience of reading, you won’t keep pushing through. The physical nature of the on-paper reading solved this for me.
The physical nature of reading is not only a visual reminder but also a symbolic object that can be vanquished. Unlike its digital cousin, who can be moved, shared, and stored with little effort, the physical object must be handled, thrown away, or given to someone. The pages must be flipped or creased. The physical object holds importance because it holds substance (or at least my subjective perception of an article’s substance). The effort it took to find, save, print, and handle creates a sunk cost that is absent free digital media. It cannot disappear from the foreground or the mind because it is purposefully sought out.
4. I was able to hand on something to others.
This last part was a complete accident. After finishing the first four of my stack, I was faced with a decision: “do I just throw these away now?” I mean, I knew what I was doing going into this experiment but I had not considered how dreadful it would be tossing each individual article in the garbage. I had just printed this!
So I decided to hand one that I had finished off to one of my employees. The subject matter was great and I figured she might get something from it. Who knows? From there, I handed out about 5–6 more to random colleagues, giving them the option to hand them on to someone else if they found the pieces meaningful.
I should note that the articles I store in my Pocket are not garbage blog posts or even journalistic nonsense. They are usually long reads, profiles, culture pieces, or other such writings that provoke thought. I say this to stave off any criticism of “lol, he’s sharing listicles with his office.”
I know how cliché this “secret santa clip-giving” sounds, but they felt to me like little gifts; granted, they were inconsequential gifts. Gifts that could have been given a different way, by means of an email or tweet, but would have had very low impact. How often when someone writes to you, “you have to read this,” do you take that as a sign to actually read it? Depends on the person, depends on the day, but probably not. The urgency in reading has fled from our shallow minds in the urgent, spontaneous media age. “READ THIS. WOW. YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.”
The value of a packet of paper may seem ridiculous and even comical to tech-savvy millennials who seek to impress others. But perhaps it is also sincere, meaningful, and useful. To me, this experiment demonstrated the importance of physical reading and, honestly, its superiority by all measures.
Want to get some reading done? Print it out.
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