Academics have a lot more reading to do. And the amount and difficulty of the reading academics have to do make that reading mentally feel like something that is somewhere between a one-step action and a full-blown project. It feels like a project because of how much reading is involved and how difficult it is to read. One feels overwhelmed by this in the way that one feels overwhelmed by the ambiguity of a large project that has yet to have all of its components defined. But it is not a project; it's reading. It's outcome vision is just simply "I've completed reading this book for Project X" with not a lot more that needs to be said about it than that; and not a lot more to be done about it than to just read it. But stepping up to a task like this generally involves stepping up to something that overwhelms. And if there is one thing that GTD teaches it is that overwhelming things need to be broken down further. This gets back to the earlier points made about academics overestimating one-step actionables; and this one is no different. It needs to be broken down into more manageable, bite-sized elements like "Read chapter 1 of book in order to further refine your thesis for the dissertation." While I am still wading through more reading than I will finish in my lifetime, the three things that have helped me out the most with getting more reading done is to list just the first, minimal action needed to get into the reading (e.g. "Read chapter 1" instead of "read this whenever you get time"); the second is to specify the estimated time it will take me to complete some reading along with the next action (e.g. Read-Review(<60min): Read this?), and finally to always specify the purpose for the reading (e.g. in order to discover new ways to improve my writing, in order to find out why?, because Joe sent you this email to read, etc.). Without a purpose, a time, and a manageable action step I've found that reading just piles up and I never get to it. But if these things are already defined up-front I am way more likely to be able to pull out my Read-Review folder when I've got some time and easily step toward a (<30min) reading item I know I've got that amount of time to complete.