What We Do, What We Read, and How We Read it Affects Your Brain

I have finished reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
and I am amazed at how powerful and flexible the human brain is. As you read, or work on something, your brain changes. The more you do something the better you get at it, but I’m sure we all knew that.

What I find surprising is that your brain can change with just a little effort. In The Shallows the author explains an experiment where the subjects worked for one hour a day on the computer. This small effort created substantial and measurable change in the brains of the test subjects.
I found this very surprising. This suggests that as little as one hour a day could make you substantially better at using Vectorworks. Not only that, it would exercise your brain in the areas that you need to exercise in order to work better on Vectorworks. I often have clients that do not want to use BIM or 3D modeling to help create the drawings. Often this is a result of fear or a lack of knowledge. The reading that I have just completed suggests that working for one hour every day can take care of this lack of knowledge, so there is no reason to avoid regular training.
The conclusion of The Shallows is that we are all in charge of what we do. Therefore you have to be very careful with how you spend your time. Spending more time doing long deep reading rather than quickly skimming information on the Internet will help you to develop your skill in deep reading. Spending more time skimming the Internet, clicking on links when if you feel the urge, will develop your skill in this area. But the downside of this [skim reading] is that you will lose your ability for deep reading.
One of my strategies is to read my electronic books on my Kindle instead of my computer. This allows me to focus on the book and not get distracted by emails, Skype, and so on.