I had a friend who once told me, why waste time reading something when you can’t gain anything from it? His idea is that if you ever read anything, you should try to maximize your benefits from it and for him, he does so by taking notes on paper while reading and staying very focused when he’s reading anything (admittedly, he rarely reads for entertainment).
I’m less extreme but I must agree with his general idea of seeking to benefit from the stuff we read since we’re exhausting our attention on them anyways. It is corollary to the idea of doing the best and achieving the best if you’re to bother to do anything at all. I’ve therefore, come up with an example of how we can best make use of what we read through asking ourselves questions that would help relate our readings to the things we learn in school. The idea is to constantly focus on looking out for examples where ideas we read about are being applied and fill our minds with a thorough understanding of how the real world has shaped the ideas that we hold about it.
I hope I can do more of such for other publications and meanwhile, you’ll always be able to access this page through a link under Economics Notes.