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A common argument against speed reading is that it is not possible to remember the content of the text when you are reading too fast. It comes from the experience of many people who have noticed that if they read too fast then they will not remember much of what they have read. Therefore they think that there is no point in increasing your reading speed. It just cannot be that you can comprehend well at fast reading speed.

It leads to an argument that the slower you read the text the better you will understand it. So if you want to remember the text then you have to be slow and careful when reading. Many people were also taught at school that if you need to understand the content very well then you should not rush when reading.

However, in the most cases poor comprehension is not caused by too fast reading speed but low concentration. In order to obtain information from the text you have to keep your mind focused to it. If you let your thoughts wander away from the text then your brain has difficulties in memorizing that information.

It may sound unbelievable but reading faster will help you to focus better. If you make a conscious decision to read at fast pace then it keeps your thoughts concentrated to the text. If you want to read fast and at the same time still be able to follow the text then you just do not have time for thinking on other issues except the content of the text.

You are more likely to get bored when reading at slow pace. Reading faster will create excitement and make you happier. In addition, if you are reading too slowly then it is more difficult to keep a stable reading pace.

Can we improve our comprehension if we decrease our reading speed? It is difficult to do although our reading speed should depend on the difficulty of the text. If you read deliberately slowly then it is more difficult to focus to the text. You thoughts will tend to drift away.

It is natural that for more difficult text your reading speed will be somewhat slower. For example, it is ok, if you read newspaper articles at 300 words per minute and in case of scientific text you decrease your reading speed to 200 words per minute. But you are not likely to comprehend better if you decrease your reading speed to 100 words per minute.

If you want to remember the text well then it is more useful to read the text repetitively than to read if very slowly. In the previous example you will remember the text better if you read it twice at 200 words per minute in comparison to reading it at 100 words per minute only once. In many cases you will only need to read the text partially for the second time as you will only look over the most important parts of it.

For improving comprehension you will also benefit from knowledge activation. When you are reading the text twice then ask yourself questions about the text or write down keywords between to readings.

kristjan Speed Reading comprehension, concentration, reading speed, speed reading

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Pretend that you got pissed off with your colleague. You argued with him loudly and that made you really angry. How can anybody be so stupid and why I have to work to together with such an idiot? You feel like your are about to punch him, but this time it will not happen. Your colleague will leave and bang your door.

Now you are alone and there is time to get back to work. Before that conflict you we reading a some materials for preparation for the seminar next week. You still feel very angry. How it is going to affect your reading performance. Can the adrenaline from the hanger help you to read faster?

Unfortunately, anger will not do any good. In order to read efficiently, which means both fast reading speed and good comprehension; you have to concentrate to the text. You have to think only about the text you are reading and you have to avoid all irrelevant thoughts. In the previously described situation it is not likely that you can fully concentrate to reading.

Full concentration means that you have to throw all kinds of irrelevant thought out of your mind. So you should not think on that colleague while reading, but it is difficult to achieve after the previous events.

Being angry will hurt your reading comprehension most. You cannot focus to the text and therefore you will have difficulties in memorizing what you have read. Your own emotional are not letting your brain to receive and store information. You reading speed is also to be affected as when you thoughts are wandering away from the text then you are making small pauses in reading, which are wasting your reading time.

If you want to read and work efficiently then the best option is to avoid that kind of conflicts. You should not let other people to destroy your working mood. Every time you argue with other persons then think how you will benefit from it. Many conflicts are actually pointless and they will give no benefits in the long-run.

What should you do when you get angry? Then you should relax before you will start reading. You have to calm down. Although it takes some time, your reading efficiency will be higher when you are calm. You can relax by forcing yourself to breathe deeply

For doing it sit straight on your chair and then inhale slowly and deeply. At the same time, relax the belly muscles. Feel that your belly is filling with air. Inhale as long as possible. Then hold your breath for a moment or two and then begin to exhale slowly. As air is slowly let out, relax your chest and rib cage. In you have exhaled completely then start inhaling again. While concentrating on breathing, throw all negative thoughts out of your mind.

Now you are ready to start with your reading. Calmly take out the text and concentrate on it. Start reading at once and do not waste time on it. This will help you to read fast and to remember what you have read.

kristjan Speed Reading concentration, conflict, reading comprehension, reading speed, reading time

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If we want to read fast then we have to concentrate to our reading material. Poor concentration will lead to slow reading speed and low comprehension. For achieving good concentration the external environment plays an important role. All kinds of distractions such as incoming phone calls, visitors, noise etc. will disturb us and have a negative effect on our reading performance.

Traditionally, people have been working at the offices and spending leisure time at home. During the recent years, working at home has become an alternative to working at the company’s office. As for many employees their work tasks include a lot of reading, then it leads to a following question: Is the best to read at work or at home?

The answer to that question depends in which environment you have better conditions for interruption free reading. If you have to share your office space with many colleagues then there can be many disturbing factors, which will turn your focus away from the text you read. If you want to do serious reading then finding a quiet place will help a lot. If your office is noisy then you should find another room or go to a library or if the weather is fine to a nearby park for your most demanding reading tasks.

Working at home can offer you more possibilities to spend time together with your family. For example, you can eat lunch with them and you can be with them the time you would spend commuting between work and home. At the same time your family can be also a distraction. You may find it difficult to concentrate to work or have a temptation to make pauses for chatting with them and so on. Kids can be an awfully disturbing factor if they are not taught to not disturb you while working. Some people may find it mentally challenging to get into the working rhythm at home as home reminds them leisure. If you have no co-workers at sight then you may start wasting time on watching TV, cleaning your room etc. Working at home needs good time management habits and self-motivation.

The amount of time you can spend working at home depends on your job. For some jobs there is no possibility for working at home. For some other jobs you can work for the most of the time at home. Although there may be many disturbing factors at the office, there are some benefits of being there. You can get information faster if you are at work instead of being at home. It is easier to ask help from co-workers in the office.

So, finding a balanced between working at home and in the office can be a solution. It may be wise to work some days a week or some hours a day at home. At home you should perform those tasks, which call for individual work and concentration. Many reading tasks belong to this group. If you have to do some research work then it could be more efficiently done at home. For tasks that require active communication with your co-worker it may be better to stay in the office.

I personally work most of the time at home. The people at the university are really very talkative and I try to avoid getting into conversation with many of them as it is clearly a waste of time. I do not have children yet, so it is easy to concentrate to the work at home. I also plan my time carefully and motivate myself to work efficiently, therefore dedicating to work is no problem. In addition, as I spend most of my working time on not university related tasks, then it is also better to do them at home.

kristjan Speed Reading comprehension, concentration, working at home

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For most people, learning to speed read means learning speed reading techniques, such as reading without regression or vertical reading. In the learning process you will change your old and inefficient reading methods with better and more rational ways to read texts. While this is absolutely true, speed reading can be also viewed at a broader scope. It is more than methods and techniques.

To benefit from speed reading techniques you should apply them into practice. In one previous post I discussed why most people do not learn speed reading http://www.startspeedreading.com/why-most-people-do-not-take-speed-reading-courses/

In addition to that there are many people who have learned to speed read but do not apply it in practice. If we test their reading speed then it is will be above the average as in case of a test they use speed reading methods. But while reading texts in their every day life they seldom apply speed reading. Some people are not confident in their speed reading skills, they worry about their comprehension. These people usually speed read only the easiest text or use it only for the reading tasks, which are not critical for their job performance or reading for leisure.

To benefit the most from speed reading you should apply it every day and for the majority of the texts you are reading. While it is not recommended to use it for non-fiction texts then you can use it virtually for every text you read on your job. Only if there are some texts, where you have to remember the context very precisely, you should slow you reading speed down, but for most of us this in not the case for the job-related reading material.

Regular application of speed reading techniques requires a change in ones mindset. It means that whenever you encounter a text you take an attitude that you will read it fast and focused. You are ready to attack the text, concentrate to it and read it with fast speed. It is a life-style, in which you want to be always fast and sharp.

If you make a decision to always apply speed reading when it is possible then reading at fast speed becomes natural to you. You do not have to tell yourself that now I am going to speed read. You just read the text and application of speed reading methods becomes automatic. Reading itself is so ordinary process for us that we do not even notice that we are reading. If we see a text, we just look at it and get the meaning of the words from the text. It is possible to achieve the same state with speed reading too, if you develop it into a habit.

The speed reading life-style allows us to read texts at fast speed, thus it enables us to work fast. We will be always attacking the texts and eager to complete our reading tasks in short time. Our reading process is active, our mind is focused and we do not even notice how fast we can fly with our eyes over the text. Being fast builds us confidence and reduces stress as we know that we can go through pig piles of texts in short time. It really makes our life easier and happier so it is worth developing speed reading habits in yourself.

kristjan Speed Reading comprehension, concentration, reading courses, regression, speed reading techniques, stress

Traditionally people have worked 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week. Although this is still agreed as nominal working hours, it is not necessarily the amount of hours people actually spend on working. A significant part of this time is spending on brakes and other work stoppages. The actual working hours measured by time-use studies tend to be on the average between 30 and 35 hours a week, but there can be a lot of individual variation in it.

Many people work actually 50 or 60 hours a week also if asked they would still report working for standard 40 hours. But does it really pay off working so much? The answer to that question depends on what are these workers aiming at.

Hard work and effort are definitely rewarded on many jobs. For making progress and winning promotion you have to beat the others and working more can be one option to beat the opposition. The employee who starts early and finishes late can be noticed by his boss and it gives him an opportunity to impress the boss. On some jobs there are possibilities for earning good extra pay for working additional hours. But in case of more and more jobs nowadays employees are evaluated for accomplishing their tasks and not just for working harder and longer. If you work long hours but if it does not help you to get good results, then why should the company pay you more.

Do working long hours allow you to achieve greater results? The answer to that question can be yes and no. On one hand, if you work longer then you have more time to achieve your results. For example, if you have to compile a market report, then you have more time for searching information or making corrections to the final version of it. On the other hand, if you work longer you will become more tired. So your productivity is going to drop. The longer your working hours are, the smaller the share of time you actually spend of working will be. In case of long hours it will be difficult to concentrate on work and employees tend waste more working time.

Working smarter and not longer can produce better results. While you may work 25 or 50% more hours, it is difficult to achieve equal productivity gains by working so long due to the diminishing productivity. For example, a report by Circadian Technologies in the US showed that white collar job performance can decrease by as much as 25% when workers put in 60 or more hours a week for prolonged periods. It means that by working for 60 hours you can do only the job equivalent to 45 hours work on normal productivity.

At the same time working smarter can increase your productivity by 100% or 200%. If you plan your day and avoid time wasting then it is possible that you can achieve your days work in only a couple of hours.

Working smarter means that you will have to manage your time. First, you have to set clear goals. You have to know what you are aiming at. Many of us waste a great deal of our working time because we do not know what the right things to do are. Equally important you should work out detailed action plans who to achieve these goals. And finally, you have to work efficiently in order to save your working time. For working efficiently you need many different skills. Besides being good at your profession, you have to be able to communicate efficiently, use computers in a rational way, be able to read and write documents fast and to motivate yourself for beating procrastination.

Long working hours can generate stress and have negative effects on your health. It is typically regarded that it is OK to work extensively for some periods, when you have greater work loads, but if long hours are a continuous practice then it may have sad long-term consequences.

Working for longer hours means also that you have less free time. You have less time to spend together with your friends and family and that is going to affect your quality of life. Although you can make more money (which might not be true always), then would you be really happy. Actually it may happen that if you work too much then you do not have time to spend your money. For example, you may have money to travel around the world to the most exotic places, play golf at the world’s best golf courses or enjoy meals at the finest restaurants, but what is the use of it when you cannot afford it to yourself because you have so much work to do.

So, how many hours is an optimal solution? There is no single solution to that question, but I am pretty sure that most people will benefit from cutting their working hours down a bit. It is often possible to achieve more by working 30 hours instead of 40 hours of weeks. Actually we are not working the 40 hours anyway in many cases but we cast procrastinate these 10 hours. If we could eliminate it, then we could finish hours working days earlier, have more rest, which will result in better health and happiness.

kristjan time management concentration, efficiency, productivity, working hours

Many people have a belief that you should not use your hands while reading. In many schools children have taught to read with out using hands for underlining the words and keep in track in reading. This was an especially wide-spread practice some 20 or 30 years ago. There has been a strong belief and it still exists that if you use your fingers for pacing and keeping track, then you will be a slow reader. Furthermore it is thought that using your hands indicates poor reading skills and an educated person will definitely not read in that way.

However, the fact that hand movements can help us to read faster was already noticed by Evelyn Wood already in 1950s. She worked out several methods for using your fingertips as a pacer. It is said to be that she discovered the benefit of reading with your hands accidently when she was wiping off dust from a book.

The main advantages of reading with you hands are that it will help you to keep track whilst reading and you can also improve your concentration by doing so. This will result in increased reading speed and better comprehension.

If you point your fingertips to the word or the line that you are reading then it helps you to keep in mind which words are you reading. The first principle of speed reading is to read all the words only once, which means that there should be not backward eye movements and re-reading some words. It will be much easier to develop that kind of reading habit if you use some kind of a pacing device, which can be your fingers. If you fingertips are pointing to the word or line (there are different methods for doing that) you are reading, then it will remind you that you should read it only once. In addition hand movements will help you to keep a steady reading pace, which is necessary for speed reading.

Reading with your hand will improve your comprehension because it directs your attention to the words you are reading instead of allowing your eyes and mind to wander. Low comprehension is mostly caused by low concentration to reading. Many readers let their thought to move away from the text and after they have completed the text they will remember little about what they have read.

Eliminating backward eye movements is one of the first things you are going to learn when you participate in my speed reading course. It will be much easier to achieve if you use you hands. There is nothing wrong in reading with your hands. It may look a little strange to the bystanders, but it is you, who is gaining reading speed by doing so.

kristjan Speed Reading concentration, hand, speed reading

For working at maximum efficiency, you have to find a steady working flow. If you can get well into your tasks and concentrate on them then you can finish your tasks in short time. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to keep that kind of work rhythm as you can get interrupted constantly. A telephone rings and you are going to answer it. A colleague steps in asks you to help him. A friend comes to visit you and starts talking and talking and there is no sign that he will leave soon. All that kind of interruptions waste your work time. The do not only take the time of a phone call or talking to the visitor, but they also disturb your work flow. It means that even if the interruption has ended, it will take you some time to achieve the working pace you had before the interruption.

If you want to work fast then you have to minimize the number of interruptions. You have to defend your time. How can you do it? The basic thing is that you have to learn to say “no”. If the visitors are going to drop in then you have to send them a way. Say them that you are busy, if you feel that you still want to meet them then suggest a suitable time for you. Keep in mind that in many cases your co-workers are stepping in not really as they cannot solve their problems on there own, but some people just want to talk. Most problems your colleagues are asking for help are not so difficult that they cannot find the answer on your own. If other people will try to find solutions to their problems on their own then they will often develop more.

Still, if their problem is something that you can solve in two minutes or less then you may still do it, but if it will take more time then you should make an appointment for that. If you decide to make an appointment with them then set a time limit. You can say that we can discuss it for 15 minutes at 10 AM tomorrow. If possible then plan all your visitors to arrive in a sequence. If you can deal with three visitors in a row in one hour, then it is far better than if one visitor is going to step in for 20 minutes in the morning, the second at noon and third in the afternoon.

If you set the time limits for meetings with visitors then you have to stick to them. If the time is up then you have to send your visitors away. Tell them that you have to start doing the next task. If you cannot solve the problem during the visit then make a new appointment on other day.

It may seem to be too radical, but is it really better than letting the interruptions ruin your work day. Do you want to work in the evening or weekends become you wasted your working time on chatting to other people? Do you want to achieve professional success or just pass your work days without doing much useful?

It is a good idea to set some hours from the day as a period when no-one can interrupt you. Put a “Do not disturb” sign on the door and set you telephone to the silent mode. For example, you can decide that from 10 AM to 12 AM you will not communicate to anyone (except there is an emergency). During these hours you can concentrate to the most demanding tasks. If you can work with out distractions for two hours a day then it often happens that during these hours you will do more work during the rest of your day.

kristjan time management Add new tag, appointments, concentration, efficiency, visitors, work flow, working time

Many people like listening to music while reading. I have been asked how that kind of a habit affects the reading speed and comprehension. Can listening to music help you to speed read or is it an obstacle to speed reading.

First, it must be stated that speed reading requires good concentration. You thoughts have to be focused on the text you are reading. Poor concentration leads to slow reading speed and comprehension. If our mind is not with the text we may lose track while reading and we may have problems with memorizing the content of our reading material.

So, the effect of music on speed reading should be judge upon the effect of music on our concentration. The question is can music distract you or could it be helpful for achieving better concentration. On the general, human mind can efficiently deal with one task at the same time. It means that if you do some other thing while reading then your performance will suffer. For example, if you are reading and talking to the telephone simultaneously, then it is likely that your reading speed will be slower, you may have difficulties in memorizing the text and the phone call may be not as successful as you wished.

The main point is that if music starts to distract us in a way that we start focusing on the music instead of focusing on reading then our reading performance will suffer. If the music is just for background then it is ok, but if it distracts your attention away from the text then it will do no good to you.

It depends on your personality and some people can find listening to music supportive to their reading process, while for the other the effect of music can be the opposite. Some people feel themselves uncomfortable in a complete silence. For them, background music can create a more comfortable environment. Still, music should be there only for the background and therefore it should not be catchy. You should actually not to listen to the music while reading. Therefore it is better to listen to instrumental music for not starting to listen to the lyrics. It is usually better if the music is relaxing by its nature, so heavy metal would not be a wise choice. You can listen to sounds of the nature or music for meditation while reading.

I personally do not listen to music while reading as I find that it will distract me. It is more difficult to concentrate and my thoughts will start wandering away from the text. You may be different from me and silence may not be the best reading environment for you.

You may also want to listen to music when you are in a noisy environment, such as an office, where other people are chatting, making phone calls etc. Then you can put on your earphones, and the music helps you to isolate from disturbing noises. Putting the earphones on may be also helpful in situations when you get often interrupted by your colleagues, who start chatting to you. If you have your earphones on then other people usually will not disturb you unless the have a serious issue to talk about.

kristjan Speed Reading concentration, efficiency, music, speed reading