Protocol: extracting a professional book in ninety minutes

The frame, and its honesty

This protocol does not make you read a two hundred and fifty page book in ninety minutes. It lets you extract its structure, its thesis, its main arguments and the applicable material, which, for the vast majority of professional books, is most of the value.

It does not suit a novel, a dense theoretical work, or a text whose value is in the writing.

The breakdown

0 to 10 min, preloading. Written objective. Five to eight questions. Table of contents. Back cover. Introduction. Conclusion. Decision on the chapters. You already know what the book is about and where the part that interests you sits.

10 to 20 min, active survey. Flick through the whole thing, two hundred and fifty pages in ten minutes, about two and a half seconds a page. You look at headings, bold, diagrams, boxes. Fold or mark the pages that look dense in useful content: usually twenty-five to forty pages out of two hundred and fifty.

20 to 60 min, targeted reading. You read only the chapters you kept and the marked pages, with a guide, at a sustained pace. A cross in the margin for what matters. No notes during this phase.

60 to 75 min, building the map. Book closed, from memory. Then you reopen at the crosses to fill it in.