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Try Angles - "Sell me this pen" (Speed Reading)

Try Angles - "Sell me this pen" (Speed Reading)

November 30, 2021

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the TRY ANGLES weekly review where my job is to share with you new readings, methods and tools that I have found and tested.

⏅ Previous Episodes

When thinking about this article I have been remembering the famous scene in the Wolf of Wall Street, when Leonardo Di Caprio asks someone:

"Sell me this pen"

Today I don't want to sell you a pen, but what if I told you that I have a device that could increase your productivity by 13%?

What would you think if you were able to save 13% of your time immediately?

Think about it

Nowadays, and especially for knowledge workers (in the definition of Peter Drucker) we spend a fair amount of time reading stuff. Let say reading accounts for 5 hours of your daily activity, including:

mails
documents
presentations
instagram and twitter post
newspapers
newsletters
.... and so on

The device I would like to present to you will enable you to save at least 40 min per day, that is 3.3 hours per week

It is a reading enhancer device, helping you to crack your reading skills

It is a speed reading device.

A device that will instantaneously give you the power to read 13% faster.

Your threats when reading

Reading is an intensive workout for our brain, because it has to compute many words compositions, it has to remember it and make sense out of it.

Reading needs a lot of focus and energy to make sure that we are making the most out of the material in our hands. Several threats are jeopardizing the reading efficieny

Backreading - when you come back a couple of words or lines before in order to make sure that you've understood the content well
Loss of focus - Reading words without actually memorizing them or making sense of them. Worse, black out when reading and not being able to remember what you have read
Subvocalizing - telling the words in your head, limiting your reading speed at the level of your speaking speed (~250 words/minute)

You can take action with simple hacks

Increasing your reading speed can be done in a simple way with these three steps:

Use the pen as pacer Using your pen as a pacer in order to slide through the lines of your pages will help you keep a focused attention on the words passing in front of the end of your pen. You'll be able to reduce back reading
Increase peripherical vision Another tip in order to increase your reading speed is to broaden your vision and try to catch and understand as many words as possible in one eyesight. The goal is to be able to read and make sense of group of words instead of juste one word at a time. Using enhanced vision will prevent you from reading white spaces (aka margins).

Beating subvocalization The hardest challenge you will be facing when trying to increase my reading speed is Subvocalizaiton. It is the voice in your head telling the words you are reading and it is going to limit your reading speed at the rate you will be speaking the words in your head; On average speaking spead is between 240 and 300 words per minute.

What can you expect with the magic pen?

An initial reading test gave me my initial speed performance

262.5 words per minute

Nothing to fancy, just the speed you would expect to have considering the element stated before.

Then I have tested my reading speed again, using a pacer, the first tactic.

The simple use of a pacer increased my reading speed to : 297.6 words per minute (+13%)

There is still room for improvement since I am still a beginner in the other techniques

peripherical vision
subvocalization

Tips to read faster on your screen

Most of us are working on a screen, hence the use of a pen scratching it might not be the best configuration.

Don't worry. Here again there are some tips in order to increase focus and retain on your devices.

App Just Read

Enable to get rid of all the distractions around what you want tot read

it works great on most of the website.

The app is free, unless you want some extra featuring enabling you to share the articles and annotate them

Freemium is more than enough for me, but in any case the premium version won't hurt too much: 1€/month

Here is how an article will look like without and with Just Read:

⧐ Link to app : Just Read

Use the top of your screen to pace

Another trick you can use is to use the top of your screen in order to pace your reading, you'll then avoid back reading

That's it for this weekly review I hope you've enjoyed it.

Thanks for reading and until next time !

Cheers,

Franck ⏅