Speed reading against information flood
Picture by hegemonx
The information available to us increases every day. And we consume more of it every day. How many e-mails do you receive? Many people get 100 or more mails in a single day. How many newspapers do you read? Many people follow 3 or 4 daily newspapers although they read the same news from them. What about journals? How many web pages and blogs you follow? How many RSS feeds do you have? And do you have time to read any books? Isn’t that all too much? And the amount of information available to us will grow everyday.
What could be the solution to that kind of information flood? Many people dream of being able to read faster. They think:”If I could only read faster then I could handle my information flows”. But is it all that simple?
Learning to speed read will allow you to consume information faster. It means that you will be able to read more text per time unit. For example, most people are able to double their reading speed by learning speed reading techniques. So after learning new reading methods the can read twice as many blog posts, e-mails or journal articles in an hour. If they could read 25 pages in one hour in the beginning then they will end up with read in 50 pages per hour.
Will it help you to cope with the information flood? Without any doubt if you can read faster then you will spend less time on reading a given amount of text. The question is that if it will be enough. If the information you want to consume doubles then doubling your reading speed will put you in to the same situation where you were before. But soon the amount of information will double again. Well, if you train yourself really hard then it is possible to increase your reading speed 4 times faster than it was initially, but soon the amount of information will double again. You cannot increase your reading speed without any limits. It is not possible to read 3 pages in one second, but if you still will not be able to read all the texts in the world even if you read at that high speed.
Being a super fast reader is not enough for dealing with the information flood. The question is how to select what to read. You have to admit that you cannot read everything. You have to be selective with reading. Read wiser, not only faster.
Actually speed reading is not only about mechanically increasing your reading speed. Although all speed reading courses focus on increasing your reading speed for completing a given text, many of them will teach you how to select your reading material. There are many techniques how to preview texts, how to set goals for reading and decide quickly what to read and what to skip. Even if you make a decision to read a text then you do not have to read it from the beginning to the end always. Actually there are not so many texts, which are worth reading completely.
It may seem to us that there is so much to read out there, especially if we think about web pages or blogs. But in fact, many of them do not contain so valuable information. Reading more does not make you automatically wiser. Think how people were living 100 years ago. They consumed much less information, but were they so much less educated then? I do not think so, they just consumed smaller amounts, but more valuable information. Nowadays there is too much fluff out there, especially on the web.
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My name is Kristjan-Olari Leping. I am a speed reading trainer. I have an associated professor position at the University of Tartu, am a policy analyst in a policy research center, I am a trainer and I am involved in many other business projects. 