Eight ways to curb your procrastinationįor some answers, we can turn to the work of the late psychologist Keith Rayner who was at the University of California, San Diego.An effortless way to improve your memory.When it comes to hard evidence, it can be difficult to assess commercial courses and apps claiming to improve your speed-reading abilities because experiments under controlled conditions conducted by independent observers are rare. The question is how much understanding you trade in for that speed.
There is no doubt that clever methods like these can help you get through the text faster. And now digital technologies have been developed, with apps that take text and then flash the words up one on the screen one at a time in rapid succession. Or methods where you learn to read several lines at a time. Or there’s meta-guiding where you use your finger to point to specific words, to keep your eyes on track without getting distracted. The most obvious method, which we all do from time to time, is to skim read, glancing through the text and flicking through the pages to try to find the key points. There are methods dating back decades that people have tried in the hope of being able to digest a lengthy book in well under an hour. Many of us would love to be able to read faster, yet still take everything in.