Basic training

While some training requires high level of skill, other exercises may be started as soon as you want. What skills can you train right away? Linking markers Creating short stories that include given words is a very simple way to remember things. Practice linking markers exercise in several ways. Level 1: Create stories with words …

How to train reading

Training reading is a bit tricky act of balancing. If you fail the balancing act, you may generate bad habits that are hard to change. Speed. The first thing to train in speedreading is obviously speed. Reading speed typically does not increase gradually, but in quantum leaps and occasional regressions. Do not be alarmed either …

Eye span

Our eye muscles are limited. If we were to focus on each word that we read, we would not be able to read above 600wpm and then we would suffer a huge headache and eyestrain. Students who try to push reading speed without learning saccades often complain that the words become blurry and they cannot …

Metaguiding

Unlike other processes we use (visualization, memorization, skimming, analysis, time-management strategies), the actual speedreading is a pretty straight-forward process.  We assume that You have already encoded all the names, dates and other dense stuff within the paragraph in prereading and the relevant markers are readily available to be used. The text is averagely dense, cannot …

Power of details

One of the things that limit our reading speed is the speed of creating markers. If we were required to create a marker per detail within a text, we would end up with a choice between 250wpm at 80% retention and 1000wpm at 20% retention. In fact, one of the reasons that other speedreading courses …

Simplifying texts

Occasionally texts or paragraphs are just too dense or too complex to be understood as written, and then we need to analyse them for our convenience. This is an example of metrics for text complexity. Rewording Some texts contain long and complex words, including words we do not fully understand. In this scenario, we can …

Doodling at school and at work will boost your productivity

Once in a while we write about doodling (or freestyle annotation) and its benefits. Students drawing in their papers where mistreated by generations of teachers. They were asked to focus, to stop fooling around and to listen to the teachers. However, the human spirit is stronger than education fashions, and student persistently doodled in school …

Getting thing done

Recently I read two articles describing complementary skillsets of getiing things done. The first article described life attitude required for getting things done, like not getting fear and controversy stop you and commitment to actually doing things. The second article described using flow and momentum to maximize performance and getting things done. These skills contribute …