4 Reasons for Interleaving Actionable and Non-Actionable Books

There are two kinds of books:

• Actionable Books: Books that create action items. Completing the action items improves your life. These are typically non-fiction books, but sometimes fiction books can also have lessons to be learned.
• Non-Actionable Books: Books that do not create action items. These are mostly fiction books and occasional non-fiction books that are purely informative (for example, an atlas book).

It is best to interleave actionable books with non-actionable books.

1. This provides you more time to digest and implement the lessons learned from actionable books.
2. This prevents you from getting overwhelmed with too many action items at the same time.
   • Also, don’t try to extract too many action items from a book. For simplicity, you could try One Chapter == One Action.
3. It also prevents getting bored from reading the same type of book for a stretch.
4. Slow learning combined with suffering (Desirable Difficulty) is apparently better for the retention of knowledge.