We live in a time where most of us are driven by improving themselves. The increasing pressure we face in our work environment forces us to learn things quicker and quicker. The main challenge is to increase our information intake while keeping the comprehension level constant.

I’d describe myself as a slow reader. I’ve always thought that I can memorize things I read better when I consciously read. Consciously reading meant for me to really read every word. This is a slow process and it would take me quite a while to finish a book.
I enjoy reading a lot. However, due to the fact that I am focused when reading, it is a very exhausting process. When reading several hours, I would only consume limited amount of pages and would be quite tired at the end.

A few month back, I wanted to increase the amount of books I read per month. I was driven by some sources that claimed that effective people read several books a month. It was something that I thought to be impossible given my reading speed. How could I increase my reading speed to read three mid-size books a month (mid-size being approximately 300 pages per book)?

Most Speed reading techniques are unsuitable

During my studies, I frequently came across some speed reading techniques. Due to the fact that I wanted to become a better student, consuming more content in a shorter period of time, I read about techniques where you skip lines, only read every third word, or jump to the next line every three words.

However, those techniques always required a lot of training from my perspective and where not so intuitive. Hence, I failed in applying those techniques. I feel that they are unnatural to our reading behavior and they do not necessarily consider the nature of our I movements.

Triple your reading speed by understanding the mechanics of your eye

A few month back I read some books by Tim Ferriss and discovered a technique that he claims to be the most natural. Being a bookworm himself, Tim claims that this technique was designed to tap into our eye’s peripheral seeing mechanics to increase speed. In the following paragraphs I want to describe the process and tell you about my experiences. You need a mid-sized book. I trained this process on a book I received as birthday present by @helenasternkopf called “The road less traveled” by Scott Peck. The book has 306 pages and average of 11 words per line and approximately 300 words per page. You should figure out the these words per line and page averages for your book before you continue reading this article.

1. MEASURE YOUR READING SPEAD

In order to confirm your increase in speed later, it helps to know how fast you are reading initially. Hence, set a timer on 1 minute start reading. When the timer is up see how many lines you read and multiply this by the average number of words per line. This number is the amount of words you can read per minute.

2. INDENT YOUR MARGINS BY 1-2 WORDS.

Tim suggests to start with cutting off one word of each side of the lines. You can do this by just drawing a line vertically on both sides of the page. You will then just read between this two vertical lines. The peripheral viewing of your eye will still allow you to see the other cut-off words, without actively reading them. An example to explain this can be seen by the picture below.

If you focus on the point in the middle you will still be able to see the squares on the left and right, right?
The cut-off allows you to reduce the amount of words you have to read per page from approximately 300 to just 240. You can also increase this margin to two or three words which would reduce the number even further. However, I found it most efficient to start reading with a 1-word-cutoff for several minutes before increasing it further.

3. USE A POINTER FOR FIXATING YOUR EYE

Another technique further increasing my reading speed, was helping my eye to stay focused, and disrupting its natural behavior of jumping from one position to the next. Take a pen or your index finger and move it along the lines. It helps to smoothly letting your eye move over the lines.

4. READ FASTER THAN YOUR UNDERSTANDING

The last aspect that Tim suggested was to read slightly faster than you can comprehend. However, I noticed that my mind would then start shifting and I would lose the meaning. Since, I was very satisfied with the improvement already, I didn’t want to trade the comprehension against the further speed improvement.

Final results

Prior applying the techniques, I was able to read 116 words per minute (yes, I am super slow). After the speed increase I was able to read 310 per minute. I read 114 pages in 2 hours including a little coffee break. To my biggest surprise, I was able to summarize the what I have read afterwards very detailed. One additional hint from my side, I found it more relaxing if I would read the first and last line of each page as well as paragraph breaks fully in order to increase my comprehension. The result was amazing and it changed my entire reading behavior.

References

Ferriss, Tim (2017), Tim Ferriss teaches speed reading On Youtube. Available at:

#QOTD: Have you ever tried any speed reading techniques? Which ones? Please comment below.

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Peace!

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