If you wake up every Monday morning dreading the number of things you have to do in the week, and fall asleep every Friday night frustrated that you haven’t had time to do them, then you’ll appreciate the fact that speed reading can be one of the best time management tools you’ll find. We all have so much information we have to deal with over the course of the day that anything which helps us to get through that information and those tasks more efficiently will help. And if you can get through your workload more quickly, you’ll have more time for yourself, your friends, and your family. You’ll be more relaxed, which will reduce the stress you feel at the workplace, and that will make you even more efficient.
While it’s obvious that a faster reading speed leads to the ability to get through work more quickly because you can read and process more words in less time, you may not be aware of another advantage of learning to speed read, and that’s learning how to read. We don’t mean “how to read” in the way you first learned to read as a child, but rather how to selectively sort through the piles of reading material you need to deal with. Most people spend a lot of time plowing through material they really don’t need to read in detail. However, a trained speed reader knows how to identify and categorize that material into three piles:
Scanning. Actually, all of the material gets scanned to classify it, but some items will not need more than that. You can usually get the gist of any text by scanning through it, noting the captions, titles, and summaries. If that’s all you needed from the document, then that’s all you need to do. However, if there are details you know you’ll need that you did not get from the scan, you’ll put the material in the second pile.
Skimming. At the second level, you’ll skim through the text and make a note of the key words, the chapter headings, any call-out quotes, and the tables and diagrams. You’ll probably want to read the first and last sentence of each paragraph to make sure you have a good idea of that part of the text. Speed reading training will teach you how to identify this key information.
Slowing down. With very detailed or highly technical material, you may not get all of the information you need by skimming through the text. In that case, you’ll put the document on a third pile, one that you know you’ll need to set aside some focused reading time to deal with.
At the end of this process, you should have three piles, and it’s very likely that much of the first pile can be thrown away. The second pile is probably things that you’ll want to file for later reference, and the third – which is undoubtedly the smallest – will give you a good idea of how much time to schedule into your week for reading.
If you find that something has stayed in one of these three piles for a long time and you haven’t read it, ask yourself if you really need to keep it around. There’s a saying in the fashion industry that if you have something in your closet that you haven’t worn for a year, throw it out – it’s obviously not something you’re going to wear. In the same light, look at any stacks of magazines, newspaper articles, or books that you have in a pile you’ve mentally marked “I’ll read these some day.” If that day hasn’t arrived, consider getting rid of the pile. If you never read through that material, it’s just one more thing on your weekly to-do list that will give you more stress, and no positive results.
