Today I learned how much not learning speed reading cost me in my life. The concept is simple when you break it down. Time is money. Why is time money? Your life is simply how much time God has given you before you die. Ta-dah.
So if you want to get more out of your life, wasting less time and being more effective with your time is paramount.
After doing just one 20 minute session from this awesome post I was able to increase my reading speed (with comprehension) from 240 wpm (yes, I wasn’t the fastest kid on the block) to 480 wpm. The coolest thing about this number is that it’s easy to do the math on which I also suck at. I can see (even without a calculator, Mom!) that my reading speed *doubled* in less than 20 minutes.
What are the implications here? Well, this book I have in front of me has about 200 pages of content pages. Each page has an average of 32 lines per page with an average of 12 words per line. 32 x 12 x 200 = 76,800 words.
I used to read at 240 wpm which would have taken me 76,800 / 240 = 320 minutes or 5.3 hours of straight, hard, punishing reading to get through.
At my new speed of 480 wpm that would be 76,800 / 480 = 160 or 2.7 hours saving me 2.6 hours of my life.
Perhaps this already jumps out as you as important. For me I jump back to my university days and think to myself how many less hours I could have spent in that stinky old UBC underground dungeon library. The other thing that jumps out at me is how much more information I could now have in my head.
The former regrets I cannot fix but the latter has inspired hope.
Let’s say one only reads two books per year, not for fun, just for painful learning. Why not save 5 hours per year for the next 30 years or add an extra 6 days of ‘free time’ to your life to spend with your family or friends?
This is awesome and I will diligently focus on this until I can do it and teach my kids.