About two years ago I started practicing speed reading, because I wanted to read more and the challenge of reading more books per year excited me. I started to quickly move my eyes through the lines, because I had the opinion that not everything included in a text is with the same importance and not being able to recall a lot of things seemed normal. However, I was a bit ashamed that sometimes I wasn’t able to recall almost anything from a chapter, because I found myself tending to be impressive by showing the others that I was able to read a lot of pages for a short period of time.
This was a bad practice and I regret that I did it. Though it seemed to save me time by reading a lot of materials for the same time than the others, we weren’t in the same level. I was way behind with the understanding and the details.
I am happy now that Scott Young has written a blog post regarding this topic, where he was able to collect the research findings and show that it isn’t effective.
This practice was based on the premise that you should read faster and save time doing other things. While it sounds a pretty attractive claim, suggesting that you would be capable of spending more time with your family and friends and do other important things, still why reducing the amount of time spent reading? If I were to choose between reading a good book and scrolling up and down the Facebook bar, you can guess what I would choose. There are things that consume a lot of our time these days and we should try to eliminate some not important ones and try to have reading sessions as a second nature, that we do not replace it with other types of tasks that aren’t urgent and important.
