Well today I took my first photoreading step, and fully previewed and photoread “The Art Of Speedreading People”. Photoreading Speedreading? Hmm maybe not a great idea but there we go.
The book suggests a five-day programme to lock-in the photoreading skills:
Day 1 - Select book, prepare and photoread.
Day 2 - Prepare, preview (< 2 minutes) and photoread. Postview for 15-20 minutes. Jot down trigger words and questions to stimulate the activation of the content.
Day 3 - Prepare, photoread, superread and dip in to the book for 30 minutes.
Day 4 - Prepare, photoread, superread and dip in to the book, reviewing questions and revising them.
Day 5 - Prepare and photoread. Review the table of contents and browse specific sections that you have become interested in.
The suggestion is that by the end of day 5, which should have taken around 3 hours, most people will have extracted the key information that they require from the book. If this is true, then it is probably still much quicker than traditional reading. I’m not sure how much time this will actually save me if, say analysing a report, because I am pretty good at doing that, but this could be very useful in consuming background reading texts that I really ought to read. The proof is in using it for novels - I’m not sure how it can work with novels unless you are so adept that you can consume it in one or two sittings, and have a fairly standard set of questions ready to ask yourself to analyse the book.
Day 1 sees me previewing and photoreading the book for the first time. Firstly I must admit that I have dipped in to this book before, pulled out a few concepts, such as my own MBTI type, and then I put it aside citing a lack of time to do the title justice. Such is the case with many of the books I have, hence the desire to learn photo-reading.
Anyway, “The Art Of Speedreading People” weighs in at around 210 pages, fairly text-heavy but it is broken in to lots of sub-sections and tables, with summaries. Previewing, which is effectively a scan through the document to get a “feel for it”, key themes or headings, “trigger” words and structure, took about ten minutes in a “calm” state. I must say that the calm state alone is very conducive to absorbing information, even with traditional reading techniques. It is unlike me to spend ten minutes focused on a single task, as I tend to be a flitter.
Then on to the photoread itself. Relaxing down (hopefully) in to the accelerated learning state, I photoread at about a page a second, maybe a little slower, although it is hard to judge how long I was in this state. It’s not natural to soften focus like that on a book, but after a while I found myself not worrying whether the words were in focus, and I just went with the flow. At times, the two pages seemed to merge in to a single page, and the white space was very noticeable. Anyway, turning the page on my outbreath, to keep my conscious mind busy, I reminded myself once in a while, of the purpose of the photoread.
Concluding with some positive affirmations, I put the book to one side and returned my focus back to normal. I then did a quick postview, recognising really only patterns of layout that I had noticed during the preview.
How much detail do I remember? Nothing more than the preview had reminded me of from my previous attempt at the book. Not surprising really, as I have yet to “activate” the learning, that is, to stimulate my memory for the information. I’m going to leave it over night and have another go tomorrow, as per the plan.
