Digitization 101: You have a ton of reading to do. How can you do it faster?

Monday, September 21, 2020

You have a ton of reading to do. How can you do it faster?

How can you read faster? This topic has come up a few times recently in conversations. If you're a student - especially at the masters or doctoral level - you have a lot of reading to do each week and it may be overwhelming. Are there tips or techniques you can use? Yes, there are!

First, you should know that we are not taught how to read faster in school. (If you were taught that, congratulations.) Generally, we're just given more to read and somehow we figure out some way of getting through it all. But we may not have figured out a real method. So if you feel like you're the only person who can't read faster, you're not.

Second, it is important to know that any technique requires time to learn and time to apply it consistently. And not every technique works all the time. There will be texts that you will have to read carefully and slowly, while there are others that you will be able to read quickly using a technique from the resources below.

Finally, a real ah-ha for me is that it is okay to not finish an article or book. Yup, sometimes what you need to do is to read portions of a work and not the entire thing. Knowing that "not finishing" is okay, I am able to release whatever guilt I had (which often made me push through a text that I didn't want to finish).

If you have different techniques to add, which are easy to apply, please leave a comment.