These 3 Steps Will Help You to Read Books Faster
If you’re like me, you can’t read 5 books a month. Let me tell you how to find you the best book on the market. How to read it as fast as possible and how to remember the most important points.
This article is the result of a 10-year battle to catch up with the designers who have more years of experience, proper institutional education or had mentors and colleagues they could learn from.
There isn’t any kind of magic pill that I can offer you. If you are a slow reader like myself, you will not read faster when you finish this. But you will get a handy quide how to overcome it.
In the following 3 steps I will show you:
- How to find the right book,
- how to read that book,
- and how to remember the most important points.
How to Find the Right Book
I tend to click on the same headlines as you, articles like 5 Books Every Designer Should Read.
Five is an OK number, but still, it would take more than a year for me to read all of it. But I usually need to learn something right now. Yesterday, if possible.
Define What You Want to Learn
Before you ask someone for a recommendation or you dive into user reviews, be sure you know what are you missing. It doesn’t have to be very specific, because you never know what you don’t know.
Try to summarise what you already know and then which direction you would like to go.
Ask For Recommendations
The recommendation is the easiest way is to ask a colleague or a fellow designer. They already know what experience and skills you have, so their recommendation will probably fit you almost perfectly.
If you do not have the luxury of knowing other professionals who read books more than you, you have to find a way to get to these people.
In today’s environment it may be Slack channels for users of various tools like Sketch, Figma, UX design groups etc. Go there, shortly describe your situation and what questions you need an answer to.
Read Table of Contents
The table of contents is your friend and it will save you a lot of time, right off the bat.
Some books for designers have one big benefit and that’s well thought through a table of contents. Once you’ve thought about what you are looking for and why, you should be able to quickly evaluate a book while checking the table of contents.
Don’t Read Reviews
It may sound too strict, but trust me, most of the reviews out there are not very useful to you at this stage.
Even recommendations can be tricky since you’ll get them from more experienced people who are already in a different situation and their way possibly haven’t been the same as yours.
The vast majority of reviews are too shallow to help you. But you can use some of them to your advantage anyway.
With respect to GoodReads, I find it best to look only at the worst reviews, the 1 and 2 star examples.
In this group of reviews you can find complaints on how the book didn’t fulfil the expectations of the readers and what those expectations were.
How to Read the Book
As mentioned earlier, the table of contents will help you the most.
You have chosen the book and now just have 15 hours of reading in front of you.
Imagine you will read for an hour every working day (I’ve never managed to get there). That means that it will take you a month to read. But the truth is, it will really take you upward of 3 months.
So how you can make it faster?
Table of Contents
Take the time and read the table of contents. I can spend 15 minutes reading the table of contents. I know how hard it is to later realize in the middle of the book that I’m really not getting what I wanted, and that I’ve started to become slower and slower in going through the content.
And I don’t read anything more in the book for a few months.
So read the ToC, every section introduction and every chapter title and subtitle. The activation part of this exercise is to think about what could be written there. Try to have in mind as you read:
- what you already know about this topic
- what are your questions about this topic
- how this topic covers what did you come for
I believe that by going through this exercise, you’ll be able to more easily jump into particular chapters. Suddenly the book will not look as thick as before, right?
Chapter Beginnings
Jump to selected chapters and read the first few lines only, two paragraphs at most. Then go to another chapter you selected in the previous step. All this can be just another 15 minutes.
When you go through these chapters, you may realise that you even may actually skip some of those, because they may not bring you closer to your goal.
Either way, now you have an idea what you can expect from all these chapters.
Summaries
Especially books for designers, professional books, are being written in a way that you don’t have to read them cover-to-cover, either to read the whole chapters.
If you are lucky, your book will have an overview of the chapter beginning and summary at its end.
I don’t have to explain to you how much time this will save you, right? So just go for these, read them all. They may contain links or references, which you can quickly check.
And after all this, just read what you think it brings you what you came for.
How to Remember What You Just Read?
If you really did think the reading through before you started, you increased chances that you will remember it without any additional effort.
Just to be sure I do one small thing after each chapter. I go back to its beginning and jump through the passages I felt important. Then you can either rewrite some parts of them to my notes or summarise them, which is even better.
Recently I become more lazier in this and since I’m using Kindle and Apple Books, I just highlight these parts and them copy-paste them or export them to my notes.
It’s great when in one year you can go and just quickly refresh your memory by reading through 20 bullet points.
Wrap Up
It’s up to you, how much you want to learn something. But if you do, this approach will save you a huge amount of hours and probably may actually enable the reading for you.
I saw several people actually try this and get into reading. I know many of you can do it too. When I did. And I’m the laziest person I know.
Thanks to Michael Haase, Petr Stedry, Zachariah Mullen, and Ruchi Saxena for helping me with the article.
