• 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?