Day 2 — A quick read or speed reading?

Even before my doctoral contract has officially started, I signed up to take the first class. This was Theory Building and Research Design in Strategy and Venturing. The syllabus had a small disclaimer: course readings equals roughly 700 pages.

Okay — this didn’t sound like all that much, but, lo and behold, already after the first week I felt that I could hardly do anything else than reading during that time. What about time for writing the pre-lecture assignment? What about doing other things? What about working with companies to validate the problem and collect data? This would not happen if I continue like this.

The solution — speed up the reading. Okay, that’s not so difficult. I’ve read faster in the past. I know that I don’t need to vocalize the words or phrases to understand them.

A quick google search and familiar blog by Tim Ferriss offers a handy advice.

Results — from being well below average in terms of reading speed I accelerated to probably several hundred words a minute. This still varies depending on the complexity of what I read and how much I want to retain. Overall, however, I know that if I stick to this approach I can get faster and better.

Another thing.

Listen when you can’t read. Today I tested https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/ and it’s worked really well. I consumed three short articles during breakfast (hint: you can drop PDFs there directly).