Incremental Reading is a learning method that can feel confusing until you actually try it. To make it easier to grasp, we’ll explore a series of analogies that each highlight a different aspect of how it works. Think of it like shining a light on the same idea from multiple angles.

We’ll start with making orange juice, then move on to building a jigsaw puzzle, the partnership between a mechanic and a driver, and finally, we’ll dive into a more detailed analogy using the world of Minecraft.

Each comparison will help bring the concept of Incremental Reading to life, so by the end, you’ll have a solid mental model of what Incremental Reading really is and why it’s such a powerful method for learning.

Orange Juice Analogy for Incremental Reading

The basic premise of Incremental Reading can be compared to making orange juice. This analogy is based on Zonnions [1]. Imagine you and I decide to race each other to fill a jug with fresh orange juice. Each of us has plenty of oranges to squeeze. The goal? Fill the jug first. We both take different approaches:

Approach A: You carefully squeeze every orange, ensuring you get every last drop of juice before moving on to the next.

Approach B: I squeeze an orange just until the juice starts slowing down, then quickly switch to another orange, leaving many partially squeezed oranges behind.

At first glance, you might think my method is wasteful. After all, I'm leaving behind partially squeezed oranges. But guess what? My jug fills much faster.

How does this relate to learning?

Think of each orange as a source of information: books, articles, videos, podcasts, or conversations. The juice represents valuable insights and knowledge.

Traditional reading (Approach A) involves working methodically through one source at a time, trying to fully absorb everything before moving on. Incremental reading (Approach B), however, involves quickly extracting key ideas from multiple sources, moving on when your attention or curiosity fades, and then returning later when your interest renews.

Jigsaw Puzzle Metaphor for Incremental Reading

The Jigsaw puzzle analogy [2] is based on Piotr Wozniak, the creator of the method. Imagine your knowledge as one enormous jigsaw puzzle, where each piece represents a bit of information from books, articles, videos, or conversations. Incremental reading is like assembling this puzzle in a uniquely effective way.

In traditional learning, you might focus on fully completing one area of the puzzle before moving to the next, carefully placing each piece until that section is finished. Incremental reading, however, is different. It’s like exploring the puzzle in multiple areas at once, placing only the pieces that fit easily or spark your immediate interest, and leaving others aside temporarily.

Initially, you might leave many areas partially complete, moving swiftly from one part to another as curiosity leads you. While this approach may look chaotic at first, it actually helps you rapidly build a broad outline of your knowledge puzzle.

How Does This Help Learning?

• Rapid Progress: Quickly placing interesting pieces keeps you engaged [3] and makes learning enjoyable.
• Enhanced Motivation: Constant variety prevents boredom, as you switch topics whenever your interest wanes [4].
• Deepened Understanding: Regularly returning to partially completed sections allows your brain to see connections and patterns that weren't obvious initially [5,6].

Why It’s Effective

Like assembling puzzle pieces, each time you return to a topic, you see new connections, making each revisit richer and more insightful. Incremental reading harnesses this natural way the brain seeks coherence, steadily building a comprehensive, interconnected web of knowledge [7,8].

Seeing the Big Picture

Over time, incremental reading leads to powerful "aha!" moments when separate sections of your puzzle suddenly connect, revealing larger insights and deeper understanding. Rather than simply memorizing isolated facts, you construct a coherent, meaningful picture of the world [9,10].

Incremental Reading in Practice

You can experiment with incremental reading by manually juggling multiple books and articles, moving fluidly between topics based on your curiosity. But managing numerous half-completed sources is challenging without help. Tools like SuperMemo streamline this method, keeping track of each piece and guiding you back precisely when revisiting is most beneficial.

Mechanic and driver analogy for Incremental Reading

Imagine you're preparing for a cross-country journey. Before you set out, you hand your car over to a skilled mechanic. The mechanic checks every detail: inspecting the tires, changing the oil, ensuring the engine runs smoothly, and fine-tuning every component. This careful attention ensures your vehicle is in peak condition for the road ahead.

But once you're on the road, you're the driver. You choose the route, decide when to take breaks, adjust your speed based on road conditions, and handle any sudden obstacles. You're fully in control, making real-time decisions that impact your journey.

Incremental Reading works in a similar way. Think of your memory and comprehension as the car, the mechanic as the incremental reading system (such as SuperMemo), and yourself as the driver.

The Mechanic (Incremental Reading Software)

Just like a mechanic thoroughly inspects and maintains your car, Incremental Reading software manages the upkeep of your memory. It schedules when you'll review specific pieces of information, ensures you revisit them before you forget, and methodically spaces out reviews to optimize retention. It carefully "maintains" your knowledge, automatically handling the details you might easily overlook if you relied solely on intuition or learning arbitrarily.

The Driver (You, the Learner)

As the driver, your role is equally important. You're not just passively receiving maintenance—you actively steer your learning. You decide what information matters most, prioritizing topics based on your interests, current goals, or curiosity. You control the depth of your engagement: skimming some material quickly, diving deeply into areas of particular interest, or setting aside less urgent information for future exploration. You adapt to changing learning needs and conditions, making the process dynamic, responsive, and personalized.

Just as driving without regular maintenance can lead to breakdowns, learning without Incremental Reading often leads to forgetting, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities for deeper understanding. Conversely, excellent car maintenance alone isn't enough, you must actively and thoughtfully drive to reach your destination.

A Balanced Partnership for Learning

Incremental Reading integrates both roles seamlessly, allowing you to leverage sophisticated tools (the mechanic) while retaining full control over your learning journey (the driver). This synergy ensures you're not only learning effectively but also enjoying a flexible, personalized, and efficient path to knowledge mastery.

So, think of Incremental Reading as the perfect partnership between mechanic and driver, both essential, both working together to ensure you reach your learning goals with maximum efficiency and enjoyment.

Minecraft Analogy for Incremental Reading

Minecraft is more than just a game, it’s a creative sandbox that mirrors many aspects of how we learn. It’s about exploring, gathering resources, crafting tools, and building complex systems from simple parts. That’s exactly what happens in Incremental Reading: you explore information, extract useful pieces, and gradually build understanding.

Because Minecraft is familiar, visual, and system-driven, it offers a relatable way to explain the mechanics of Incremental Reading. Just as a player starts with a chaotic world and slowly organizes it into meaningful structures, a learner uses Incremental Reading to shape raw information into lasting knowledge, one block at a time.

Blocks and Incremental Reading Extracts

In Minecraft, blocks represent raw resources in the game world. These blocks need to be mined to extract usable items, just as incremental reading extracts represent smaller, manageable pieces of raw information taken from a larger article. The process of breaking a block into an item is analogous to extracting a section of text into a discrete unit of knowledge.

Mining as Extracting and Learning

Mining in Minecraft requires effort to turn blocks into items, just as extracting text in Incremental Reading involves actively reading and processing information. This effort transforms the text into something usable: a clear idea, a fact, or a flashcard. Mining efficiently means focusing on the most valuable blocks, just like Incremental Reading encourages you to prioritize the most useful information.

Items and Knowledge

In Minecraft, items are crafted from or collected as resources stored in your inventory for later use. In Incremental Reading, these are comparable to fully understood pieces of knowledge: processed information that has been internalized and is now part of your mental inventory. Items (knowledge) can be used to build (solve problems) or combined with others to create new tools (ideas).

The Mine Drive and Learning Drive

In Minecraft, the mine drive compels players to seek out resources that align with their current goals, such as finding diamonds to make tools. Similarly, the curiosity in Incremental Reading guides you toward the information that feels most rewarding or relevant. In incremental reading, this manifests as the natural pull toward extracts that seem interesting or important.

For example, if you're exploring how to improve your sleep and you see an extract discussing blue light and melatonin, it feels highly relevant, like finding iron right when you need a new pickaxe.

Efficient Mining = Incremental Reading Efficiency

Minecraft players skip less valuable blocks when searching for rare resources, just as Incremental Reading encourages you to skip over less relevant text and focus on extracts that align with your goals. Incremental Reading’s prioritization system helps you efficiently "mine" valuable knowledge while leaving the rest for later, or discarding it entirely.

Building with Knowledge

In Minecraft, collected items are used to build structures or tools. In Incremental Reading, processed extracts and flashcards are combined to construct a larger knowledge framework. For instance, understanding separate concepts about concurrency, threads, and synchronization builds a comprehensive mental model for solving software problems.

Exploration and Serendipity

In Minecraft, exploring a cave for diamonds may lead to the serendipitous discovery of emeralds or a treasure chest. Similarly, in Incremental Reading, pursuing one topic often leads to the unexpected discovery of valuable, related knowledge. This is why free exploration of articles in Incremental Reading is so powerful: it allows your learn drive to guide you toward serendipitous insights.

Inventory Management and Sleep

In Minecraft, your inventory can become cluttered with useless items, requiring sorting. Incremental reading similarly benefits from systematic prioritization and cleanup of your queue. Sleep in real life, much like an automatic Minecraft inventory organizer, helps consolidate memories and optimize the knowledge you’ve acquired during incremental reading.

Example Workflow in Incremental Reading as Minecraft Mining

1. Discovering a Cave: You encounter a long article. The cave is like the article: it contains many blocks (chunks of information) of varying value.
2. Extracting Valuable Blocks: You highlight key parts of the text and extract them, just as you mine valuable ore blocks while leaving dirt or stone.
3. Skipping Irrelevant Blocks: You skip over uninteresting parts of the article, akin to bypassing coal when you're hunting for diamonds.
4. Processing Items: You refine your extracts into flashcards, just as mined blocks are turned into items for crafting.
5. Building Knowledge: Over time, your collection of flashcards helps you solve problems or create new ideas, just as Minecraft items help you build tools or structures.

Takeaway

Incremental Reading may seem unusual at first, but through these analogies, its inner workings become clearer. Whether you're squeezing meaning like juice, fitting ideas like puzzle pieces, digesting knowledge in layers, fine-tuning your learning like a driver with a smart mechanic, or crafting insight block by block in a Minecraft world, each metaphor reveals something unique.

The key insight? Incremental Reading is not about memorizing everything at once. It’s about interacting with knowledge bit by bit, letting your curiosity and goals guide you, while the system supports your memory behind the scenes. It’s an intuitive, efficient, and even enjoyable way to learn… once it clicks. And with these analogies, hopefully, it just clicked.