There's a lot of different strategies depending on your needs and goals.

Micro strategies:

• meditate before reading

• leave phone and any other distractions in another room (if focus is an issue)

• plot out a chunk of time where you don't do anything except focus on reading

• get a notebook and write a ~1-sentence summary of each paragraph as you read. This forces you to absorb the information before moving on, rather than scanning over the text and eventually getting lost. although if you're struggling with understanding a paragraph, read further and then come back, since often it takes larger chunks of information to grasp a concept.

• actually google or write down words you aren't sure the meaning of. this usually becomes necessary if you're doing the 1-sentence summary thing. Can even do the same with concepts if you don't quite get them.

• some people vibe with a more Hermeneutic method, where you quickly skim a larger chunk before coming back and studying smaller parts in detail.

• don't waste your time: definitely try and push your limits so you can get better, but it's okay to take breaks and adjust your methods if they aren't working.

Macro strategy:

Make a list of questions that you want answered, then find the specific parts of Capital that answer those questions (or videos, or discussions, or podcasts, or secondary reading). Add questions as they arise. Reading Capital front to back is a good but lofty goal. A person could spend their whole life studying it. But when it comes down to it, your goal probably isn't to become a Marx scholar, it's to better understand capitalism so that you can better engage in praxis. So rather than force yourself to absorb every gritty detail, give yourself achievable goals: do you understand commodity fetishism? do you understand labor theory of value? the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? dialectical materialism? Choose a topic that interests you and do a deep dive, using whatever resources you need. Maybe do a quick-ish readthrough of Capital so that you can say you've read it lol.

Secondary reading has pros and cons but I often find it very useful. A big con is obviously that you're filtering the original information through another person and their ideology. But as long as you don't treat it as the authoritative source of information, but one of many tools in understanding a concept, it can be worth it. It's also nice in some contexts to have concepts brought up to date or given useful context that wasn't available at time of writing. And usually you aren't yet interested in the hard theoretical proof that original writing requires (because it's talking to / arguing with other theorists), but just the concepts in light-reading form. Then once you get a better handle on the concepts you can always do deeper dives later.