I'm also not sure what "one thing I am going to take action on" means when the current book I'm reading is a history of Australian-East Timorese foreign relations. In general it sounds like a tactic for reading self-help or spirituality books and not much else?

I also don’t see how that thought will help. I don’t have the attention to focus on a book, I’ll surely forget my thought about what I’m going to take action on.

You could perhaps lobby Australia to cut the Timorese some goddamn slack on the oil?

Indeed, or at least lobby my government to cut the oil spying whistleblowers, including the author of the said book, a bit of slack... alas these things might be a bit out of place alongside the "get more exercise" and "change my morning routine" items on the One Thing List.

Agreed. It wasn't so much 'how to read books' as 'how to get something out of books (without actually reading most of them)'.

For people who want to actually get through books, I'd recommend this tool [1], which I created several years back. It has become fairly popular in the ADHD world and is recommended at top universities (Stanford/Yale/Dartmouth) to students with ADHD and dyslexia. It works with Kindle books as well as many websites.

The Chrome extension comes with a 2-week free pass and I'm happy to send a month-long pass to any HNers out there who can benefit from it.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

This looks like a neat idea! A couple of questions if you don't mind: 1. Does the pass apply to the Firefox version too? 2. When you say "It works with Kindle books..." what do you mean? On desktop only? (My) Kindle doesn't have colour.

Yes for Firefox and yes via the kindle cloud reader (on desktop or our iPad app).

That's pretty cool, though I think I would be capable of creating a userscript that can apply gradient text.

Yeah, the most seamless way is when it's integrated into a browser itself. The new Insight Browser (YC W19) offers this functionality in a pretty slick way (and it's totally free). [1] We also have a JS widget that can be embedded into a website, like The Program has done for their transcripts. [2]

1: https://www.insightbrowser.com

2: https://programaudioseries.com/0-the-program-comes-for-us-al...