Excerpt from an email I wrote to a friend that I thought could be of value to others – my experiences with speed reading techniques.
For reading I have struggled myself for years with “so many books, so little time” and did speed reading, etc. Nothing ever really stuck but a few good pieces of advise I accumulated over the years were: “Read the intro and the back jacket and discard the book there and then if it is not of much value/does not resonate – this is the best speed reading technique of all as it reduced the amount of stuff you read dramatically and you can spend the time reading the value books at your own pace”.
The “intro, chapter summaries, conclusion” method sounds good too although I have never tried it.
Actually ingesting volumes and volumes of data by way of speed reading through it all really does not sound like a healthy alternative to me. I read slow and my mind wonders too.
Finally another great method I came upon recently is reading/listening to summaries. This one package has been great http://www.philosophersnotes.com/ (sign up for 3 freebies at the bottom to get a taste). I am able to “read” 2-3 books in less than an hour, if one does not resonate or stick, I move on. If something makes a lot of sense I listen again as the summary introduces only the main ideas so I try to commit main ideas to memory and translate into behavioral or mental shifts. Or you can then actually buy and read the book itself. The downside of summaries is that you have to do the hard work of implementing ideas into life, as opposed to reading a full book where the author does the hard work of creating the necessary paradigm shifts through his writing style and persuasion.