Managing a LOT of Reading + Assignments

[ashkir]

Good morning,

First, before I ask this question, please know that I AM enjoying my doctoral program. I've posted a few threads sort of venting and asking questions, but I am in no way planning to drop out of this program. 

My question is, how have you managed all of the reading assignments? I am taking eight credit hours per semester. For each class, we have probably 400 pages of reading a week (e.g., books, journal articles) in addition to a Discussion Board or multi-media assignment, 3-4 video lectures, a writing assignment that is usually ten pages or so, and a critical writing assignment at the end of the semester that is 20-30 pages. It's doable but it's a lot. 

Are you really reading everything you are assigned? I'm hearing that many people just skim for the parts germane to the assignments, or maybe they read the abstract, skim the body for main points, and then read the conclusion of a journal article. This is a different way of studying than I have ever done before and my brain is having a difficult time processing that I don't need to read every word. My eyes, on the other hand, are screaming bloody murder. 

I do a few things to help with this:

1. I use blue light glasses if I'm reading on screen.
2. If an audiobook is available, I might listen while going on a walk. 
3. If it's a journal article, I'll load it into Natural reader and have the OCR enabled so it can be downloaded to MP3 or just read allowed. Natural reader also lets me plan ahead because I can load all the material for the week, and it gives me time estimates (upper right-hand corner) of how long it will take to read it so that I can plan my time accordingly. Sometimes reading along plus listening helps me to absorb information better.
4. If it's in print, I just do what I must do. 

Any other tips, tricks, best practices that worked for you?

Natural readers are fantastic. I have Speechify. I got new hearing aids that allow me to hear much better, and these help a lot.

I also am a huge fan of quillbot.com you can copy/paste entire articles and click "summarize" and just get the gist.

Skim, don't read everything. There's a lot of material. Read the sections relevent. A lot of times there are giant books linked, but, only chapter 3 of the entire book is relevant to your class.,

8 credits? That sounds like a lot for a doctoral program!

I notice you only load "journal articles" into Natural Reader. It looks like they'll also do epubs, which is something available for most types of books. If you purchase an ebook, you can use Calibre to convert most of them to DRM-free epubs.

I'm doing 12 per semester right now.