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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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Most of us are spending a considerable portion of their working time reading and writing e-mails. An average office worker spends 1-2 hours daily, dealing with email, which is up to 25% of working time. We may have tens or hundreds of emails waiting for us when we arrive in the office and it may take a lot of time to deal with them.

But what if we could handle our mail faster? We will have more time for other work tasks then and we could finish our day earlier. Following I will give you some tips how you can save time on e-mail communication:

• Decide when you read your e-mails. Having certain times during a day to read emails is a good time management practice. Checking e-mail twice a day is enough for most of us. The advantage of dealing with incoming mail on a certain time is that you will deal with a large number of mails together. In total, it will take you less time to read your mails in comparison of checking mail for every hour and dealing with only a small number of them at one time.
• Deal with one mail only once. You should open a message only one. After opening it read it through immediately (if is worth reading) and make a decision what are you going to with it. Are you going to reply to it, forward it to others, are there any actions to be taken by you? Make that decision at once.
• Learn to speed read. Speed reading techniques will enable you to work through you mail faster and you will save a lot of time.
• Send less mail out. Avoid sending mail when there is no need for it. In many cases making a phone call is more efficient than sending an e-mail. Before writing a mail ask yourself is it better to call or send mail on that occasion. Do not send jokes, videos and other funny stuff to other people. It wastes your and their time.
• Keep you messages short. Writing shorter messages will cost you less time, but you will also save the time of the recipient. Write a clear heading to the mail, so that it could be understood at once what the message is about. A good email starts we a call to action, it means that you tell at one what do you want to achieve with this mail, for example organize a meeting, send a report, ask for permission etc. Next, there should be the details of the issue in the middle part of the message, where you present the relevant information. Finally, the message should have a clear conclusion, where you summarize main points and repeat the call to action.
• Delete spam immediately. Do not waste your time on reading junk mail. Usually the mail program can send that kind of mail automatically to the spam folder and you should not waste time on reading these mails. Still, some times may happen that the spam filters send mails that you need to the spam folder. Therefore before deleting spam you should check the sender and title of these mails.
• Teach others to send you less mail. You are likely to receive 80% of mail from 20% of addresses, which belong to the people you work in close relations. If you tell them not to send unnecessary mail, then you can reduce the amount of your incoming mail.

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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.

It is very difficult to judge if the speed reading techniques would be applied more easily to some languages than the other ones. Still, there exist some differences in the average reading speed if we measure it by words per minute. In different languages the average length of a word is not equal. For example in English, the words tend to be somewhat shorter on the average than in other languages. It means that the reading speeds in English measured in words per minute are somewhat faster. For texts written in English, the average reading speed in about 180-250 words per minute. In case of German language the average reading speed is said to be about 20% slower. But this does not mean that for German language the benefits of speed reading are smaller than for English. Speed reading will increase the reading speed in case of both languages although the speed will be always slightly higher in English.

If you are starting to learn speed reading then I would recommend you to use texts in you mother tongue for practice. Even your command in foreign language is excellent it would be easier to read in your native language. If the text is easier to read then you can focus more on your reading techniques.

My free speed reading tips are written in English, but it does not mean that you can not make use of them if English is not your native language. As these tips will provide you the descriptions of speed reading techniques and exercises for practicing speed reading then you can choose for practicing speed reading on your own in your mother tongue. Later, when you have already acquired the speed reading skills, then you can apply them to texts written in foreign languages too. However, you reading speed in foreign language will remain some what slower in comparison to your native language if you have an excellent command of that foreign language.

But what if we could handle our mail faster? We will have more time for other work tasks then and we could finish our day earlier. Following I will give you some tips how you can save time on e-mail communication:

• Decide when you read your e-mails. Having certain times during a day to read emails is a good time management practice. Checking e-mail twice a day is enough for most of us. The advantage of dealing with incoming mail on a certain time is that you will deal with a large number of mails together. In total, it will take you less time to read your mails in comparison of checking mail for every hour and dealing with only a small number of them at one time.
• Deal with one mail only once. You should open a message only one. After opening it read it through immediately (if is worth reading) and make a decision what are you going to with it. Are you going to reply to it, forward it to others, are there any actions to be taken by you? Make that decision at once.
• Learn to speed read. Speed reading techniques will enable you to work through you mail faster and you will save a lot of time.
• Send less mail out. Avoid sending mail when there is no need for it. In many cases making a phone call is more efficient than sending an e-mail. Before writing a mail ask yourself is it better to call or send mail on that occasion. Do not send jokes, videos and other funny stuff to other people. It wastes your and their time.
• Keep you messages short. Writing shorter messages will cost you less time, but you will also save the time of the recipient. Write a clear heading to the mail, so that it could be understood at once what the message is about. A good email starts we a call to action, it means that you tell at one what do you want to achieve with this mail, for example organize a meeting, send a report, ask for permission etc. Next, there should be the details of the issue in the middle part of the message, where you present the relevant information. Finally, the message should have a clear conclusion, where you summarize main points and repeat the call to action.
• Delete spam immediately. Do not waste your time on reading junk mail. Usually the mail program can send that kind of mail automatically to the spam folder and you should not waste time on reading these mails. Still, some times may happen that the spam filters send mails that you need to the spam folder. Therefore before deleting spam you should check the sender and title of these mails.
• Teach others to send you less mail. You are likely to receive 80% of mail from 20% of addresses, which belong to the people you work in close relations. If you tell them not to send unnecessary mail, then you can reduce the amount of your incoming mail.

I started to interest me how much time people spend reading newspapers on the general. There have been conducted many studies for finding answer to that question. The first thing I noticed when looking for that answer is that many studies have highlighted that since 2007 consumers spend more time online than reading newspapers and this is true for both U.S. and Europe.

According to the result of the National Readership Survey in UK the majority of readers spend from 30 minutes to 1 hour on national newspapers daily in 2007. It was noted that a weekday (Monday-Friday) issue of a daily newspaper is read for an average of 40 minutes. The average Saturday newspaper is read for an average of 57 minutes, with 42% of readers spending an hour or more. The average Sunday newspaper is read for an average of 61 minutes, with 50% spending an hour or more. 15% of people spend 2 hours for reading newspapers on Sundays and about 6% of them read newspapers for 3 or more hours on Sundays. http://www.nrs.co.uk/time_spent_reading/time_spent_reading

When considering the previous piece of information then the student who said she reads newspapers 2 to 3 hours a day is not that exceptional. But still, is it really worth spending so much time on newspapers. Of course, it depends on what do we want to do with our time. If we like reading newspapers so much then we may do it.

Still, I think that one reason behind that fact that some people spend so much time on newspapers is that they are slow readers. It takes much time for them to complete the texts and they are not selective while reading articles.

If you want to get information quickly from the newspapers then you should read only one daily newspaper. Unless, the topic is very interesting for you and you really want to get the maximum information or to compare how different editions have handled a particular topic, there is no point in reading about the same piece of news from different newspapers.

You do not have to read all the articles from start to the end. Newspapers can be efficiently looked through by preview techniques. You will only read the most important parts of the articles, which are usually the end and the beginning of it, for the articles that do not offer the highest level of interest for you.

You can learn more for previewing texts from my free speed reading tips.