When you improve your speed-reading skills, you become more efficient at reading larger amounts of text, because you’ve learned to eliminate the things that slow you down. Speed-reading practice will teach you to avoid backtracking, to widen your visual field to encompass more words at one time, and to get rid of bad habits like subvocalization.

Another way to improve your efficiency is to take a few moments to think about the reason that you’re reading something. Are you looking for a piece of specific information? Do you even know that what you’re looking for is in this piece of text – or at least that there is a good chance it is? You can streamline the information-gathering process and increase your reading speed by only reading the things that you need to read. Ask yourself why you’re about to read something before you start. Identify what you want to get from it, what questions you need to ask, and what answers you’re looking for. Is this something that will help you do your current job? Will it give you new information to advance your career? If someone else gave it to you to read, why?

Additionally, you need to be able to identify the information that is valuable in the things that you do read. When reading something for specific information, think about what you want to learn or find before you start reading. Get a list of key words and focus on them for a few minutes before starting to read. Your eyes will target those words when you’re reading, which will help you identify those passages that you need to read more carefully.

Think about these points before you begin reading, and you might find out that you don’t even need to start going through a specific piece of material, or that you can set it aside for when you have more time. Learn to prioritize your reading with this process, and you’ll be more efficient at work, and have more free time at home.