Absorb Information Faster Than Your Peers!

Part of per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity is to be able to absorb infor­ma­tion fast and process it.  Your abil­ity to read fast there­fore is very impor­tant and has an impact of your over­all per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity.  Are you always stuck with the prob­lem of catch­ing up with other co-worker’s speed in read­ing or absorb­ing infor­ma­tion?  If part of the job is read­ing tons and tons of doc­u­ments, the fol­low­ing rec­om­mended tips will be use­ful for you to over­come slow­ness in read­ing.  We need to begin by set­ting up the right envi­ron­ment for absorb­ing information.

• Elim­i­nate ALL dis­trac­tions – Remove any­thing that can dis­tract you.  They can be your family’s photo.  Another doc­u­ment that is pend­ing your review.  Your mobile phone or Black­berry device.  Your To-do list.  Any­thing that can shift your attention!
• Get away from ALL dis­trac­tions – If you can’t elim­i­nate ALL dis­trac­tions, then you remove your­self from the dis­trac­tions.  That is, go to a place that does not have dis­trac­tions.  Say a quiet room or what­ever place that you can focus your 100% atten­tion to the material.
• Find out the pur­pose of read­ing the mate­r­ial – This helps you align what is expected of the doc­u­ment.  You want to also know the things you are get­ting out of the doc­u­ment.  By find­ing the pur­pose of read­ing the mate­r­ial, it makes the read­ing more pur­pose­ful and for you to be more ready to digest the content.
• Scan the con­tent page and entire mate­r­ial first – Often we nose-dive into the mate­r­ial straight away.  This is counter pro­duc­tive.  Scan­ning the con­tent page allows you to know the things that are being dis­cussed in the mate­r­ial.  While scan­ning the entire mate­r­ial does almost the same thing, it also helps you get in-tune faster when you are really into read­ing it.

Now, we’ve got every­thing ready for speed read­ing.  How can speed read with max­i­mum efficiency?

• Scan the para­graphs (again) – Scan the para­graphs to catch the key points.  Usu­ally it’s in the first two sen­tences of the para­graphs.  You can skip the exam­ples in the mate­r­ial if you under­stand it fully too.
• Read with a fin­ger – Point at the state­ment that you are cur­rently read­ing.  It puts your eye and atten­tion focus on that statement.
• Read key words – About 40 to 60 per­cent of the text are use­less Eng­lish.  Get the impor­tant mes­sages out from the mate­r­ial unless your focus is about under­stand­ing the type of lan­guage and cliché used in the mate­r­ial.  Else it’s just a waste of time.

• Quit talk­ing to your­self – Yes.  Some of us do that (if not most of us).  We talk to our­selves repeat­ing inter­nally our mind of what we read.  You are not pro­cess­ing the con­tent but just repeat­ing it ver­bally inter­nally.  This is slow as talk­ing is much slower than absorb­ing.  There­fore, quit the talk­ing and spend the atten­tion on acquir­ing more infor­ma­tion from the material.
• Take a break – Yes, take a break when you are tired.  Do not strain the eye.  You won’t absorb any­thing when you, the eye or mind is tired.  You are just read­ing for the sake of reading.
• Re-write your under­stand­ing – Use some­thing like a Mind Map or maybe just list­ing down what­ever you have absorbed in the con­tent.  This will allow you to re-ask what you have absorbed.

There are other ways that used by var­i­ous peo­ple for max­i­miz­ing speed read­ing and it works dif­fer­ently with dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als.  How­ever, we hope the tips for speed read­ing is use­ful to you.  What are the other meth­ods that you use to increase the speed of reading?

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