Speed reading between the lines

The Life: Executives and working professionals spend about four hours- each day- digging through digital text and other documents. Want to learn how to read faster? The Life provides some useful tips.

Musa Al Sadoon is the owner of Executive Skills Training, a consultancy in the UAE that provides speed-reading coaching to corporate clients throughout the GCC. Pawan Singh / The National

Like many executives, Ali Hussain Sajwani finds that much of his day goes by buried in text.

"Most of the time I spend the days either in meetings or reading … reading emails, reading documents," says Mr Sajwani, the chief information officer of the bank Emirates NBD. "That's most of the time."

Mastering the art of speed reading in this fast-paced, efficiency-driven business world is becoming more of a necessity these days. Some experts say executives and working professionals spend about four hours each day reading in some capacity, whether that's perusing hard-copy contracts or skimming digital text and email on a smartphone screen.

Ideally, though, many would like to finish their daily reading requirements within three or even just two hours. "Most executives actually end up staying behind after working hours," says Musa Al Sadoon, the owner of Executive Skills Training, a consultancy in the UAE that provides speed-reading coaching to corporate clients throughout the GCC. "The main reason is they didn't finish their reading requirements."

Many professionals are also itching to scratch the surface of that ever-growing stack of industry magazines, not to mention all those books piling up at home. But compared with peers throughout the region many can't seem to find, or create, enough time to get through it all.

According to a survey from Yahoo Maktoob Research, just 22 per cent of people in the Emirates say they read books regularly for their own enjoyment - below Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and Iraq.

So how can busy professionals sift through text faster? Some experts, including Mr Al Sadoon, employ devices such as the Reading Accelerator, which trains the eye to read at faster rates.

But there are less technical steps to try:

Prioritise

Being an effective reader starts with a bit of organisation. "Before I attack the actual documents or emails, I need to preview or skim them," says Mr Al Sadoon.

Important emails should be separated into a special folder, while others can stack up for a quick scan later. When it comes to handling brief magazine or newspaper articles Mr Al Sadoon suggests reading the first and last paragraphs then skimming through the rest, which means trying not to slow down to check every word's spelling or exact pronunciation. "That is one of the most effective techniques," he says.

Don't slow down

Conventional thinking goes that reading more slowly will help professionals understand a document better. That logic applies best to technical or legal writing.

Reading slowly, which Mr Al Sadoon defines as less than 200 or 150 words a minute, often ends up being a big time waster. "What happens is that after two or three paragraphs your mind literally gets bored," he says. "You start to drift and think about the meetings you have to attend or the telephone calls you have to return. At the end of the page you regress because you don't remember what you have read."

Try chunking

As children, we're typically taught to read one word at a time. Yet Mr Al Sadoon argues there's less need for that in adulthood. A better tactic, he says, is chunking.

"Chunking means looking at a group of words, ideally a phrase," he explains. For example, the word "minute" could be used in one of two sentences, such as, "that's a minute detail" or "the boss needs another minute". Speed readers learn to chunk a series of words together and build context quickly so that they can breeze through the sentence without having to stop and pronounce every word in their head.

Quicken the pace

Reading faster is easier said than done. While many professionals spend their days glued to a computer screen, Mr Al Sadoon says they tend to read 20 per cent slower this way due, in part, to bright backlight that strains the eyes. He suggests dimming a screen, and ensuring it is situated at eye level, to help facilitate faster read times.