The vendor sent the migration guide
on Thursday.
Twenty two pages.
You blocked an hour,
closed the chat,
and read it start to finish.
It felt like work.
Your eyes went down every page.
On Monday
somebody asked
what the guide said
about the old API keys.
You did not know.
It was on page nine,
in bold.
The old keys stop working
on the first of the month.
Here is the mechanism.
Your eyes and your attention
are two different machines,
and only one of them
tells you when it stops.
Researchers have asked people
to read a long text
and pressed a question on them
at random moments.
Where is your mind right now.
A large share of the time
it was somewhere else,
and most of those times
the reader had not noticed.
Their eyes kept moving.
Line after line,
page after page,
the movement carried on
after the meaning had stopped
coming in.
This is called mindless reading,
and the worst part
is how it feels.
It feels like reading.
There is no alarm.
You discover it
only when you try to use
what you thought you had taken in,
and find a gap
exactly the size
of the part you needed.
Dense, important,
dull documents
are where it happens most,
which is a cruel combination.
So stop treating reading
as something you finish.
Make it something
you produce.
Before you start,
write the questions
you need answered.
What breaks.
By when.
What do I have to change.
Read with those open.
At the end of every section,
look away
and write one sentence
about what it said.
If you cannot,
you were not there.
Go back now,
while it costs a page
and not a Monday.
Read the important parts aloud
if you have to.
Your mouth cannot wander
as quietly as your eyes.
Reaching the last page
proves your eyes were busy.
It proves nothing
about where you were.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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