How to read more books in less time— Tips, Lifehacks, Exercises

This article is for those who want to read more books— faster, more attentively, and more effectively. These simple exercises and tips can save you a lot of time. And the time allotted for reading to use the highest quality.

How to read more books faster?

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, reads more than 50 books a year, which is at least one book per week. If he can manage some time to read books, you all can. Here are a few of the most effective tips and lifehacks on how to read more books in less time.

1. Define the purpose of reading

Most people cannot remember anything because, at a crucial moment in time, they did not decide to keep it in their memory. Setting the goal of reading just before the reading should become a habit. The purpose of reading allows you to skip those places and chapters that do not correspond to it and focus on what is essential.

Experiment

There were two groups formed for one scientific study. Both groups were given large text for reading. Participants were informed that they would then be tested according to the content of the book. One group was told that the test would have questions throughout the text, the second group – that the test addresses a specific main topic. The questionnaire was for the entire content of the book.

It was assumed that the group that was supposed to pay attention to the whole content of the test was in a better position. However, the participants of the second group in the experiment proved to be much better. Due to their concentration on a specific topic, they read the text more actively to find these places in it.

Even if you think that you need to know the entire contents of the book, you should approach it with focused questions:

• Why am I reading this book?
• How important and critical is this book for me?
• What information do I want to take from this book?
• In what area do I want to use the acquired knowledge?

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2. Make a preview of the book

A preliminary acquaintance with the material will help highlight the essential points. Go over the entire book in 2-3 minutes. It will be much easier for you to put together a complete picture from pieces of information, which leads to a deeper understanding. Pay attention to the content, headings, words, and phrases in italics and bold, the summaries at the end of the chapters, and anything else that attracts attention. Text preview helps to understand better and remember what you read.

At the preview stage, you can understand whether you will achieve your goal or not by reading this book. After the preview, your target can be adjusted:

• You will appreciate that the book is not suitable for you, and will not read it;
• You will understand that only a few chapters are ideal for your purpose, and you read them exclusively;
• You will understand that this book is what you need.

3. Train mindfulness

To have time to read more in one period, you need to upgrade your skill of attentiveness and perseverance. Two exercises will help with this:

Freeze and watch

Select an object under your review and examine it for one minute. All attention and all thoughts should be only about this subject.

Read and count

Open a book or magazine. If you really want to read more books in less time, then read and count at the same time how many letters “n” you have encountered in the text. After you finish reading 1-2 paragraphs, check yourself:

• Retell the text;
• Count how many letters you missed.

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4. Learn to recognize words quickly

These exercises will help you to recognize words that appear in the text quickly. For training, you need a table of words or a journal with narrow columns of text.

Hide and seek

Take a small piece of paper or a business card and close the first word of the first column. Open it for a moment and close it again. During this moment, you need to be able to recognize what kind of word it is. With three-letter words, this is easy, so you can start with words of five to seven letters or try to do it right away with the lines of the magazine.

Captions

A sheet of paper now needs to be kept from top to bottom, closing the words. Gradually, speed can be increased. This exercise teaches the gaze to always go forward only in the text, without returning to what has already been read.

5. Increase the point of view

Schulte tables are used to train vision for pilots, military, airport controllers – in all professions that require visual control over a large number of instruments and areas. For book lovers, the skill is also beneficial – it allows you to see several words at once, or even the entire line, in one stop on the line.

You need to look at the center, and with peripheral vision, find the numbers from 1 to 25 as quickly as possible. The time you need to strive for when doing this exercise is 25 seconds. It is interesting to do this in pairs – draw tables for each other, share them. And when one looks at the center of the table, the other watches his eyes so that they do not move. You can increase the grid of the table, for example, make 7×7.

6. Always keep a book at hand

Put the book in your bag, near the computer, download it to your tablet or phone. And read when you have a free moment. There are such moments every day – when you stand in line when you are waiting for someone at a meeting when the computer restarts when you drink coffee when you fly on an airplane. Do not waste this time, but use it to your advantage.

Conclusion:

We hope these awesome tips on how to read more books in less time helps you to enhance your reading habit and increase your reading list. If you have more tips to add, let us know via the comments below.

About the author:

Melisa Marzett is the one who spends any free moment reading. She does not like the feeling of time spent in vain, which is why there is always a book in her bag. She is a traveller, a translator and a content writer who is currently writing for Resume Perk. Apart from that, she enjoys handmade, cooking, and swimming.