Speed Reading

"Double your reading speed in as fast as one weekend. Only $399*
*paid in 4 manageable intallments"

Lol, sounds like a cringe comercial. And, well, a bit of appealing, right? I mean, who wouldn't want to read more books in less time? 🤷‍♂️

But as with many self-improvement ideas, the reality is a bit messier.

In this blog post I'll explain what sparked the experiment, the techniques from Tony Buzan's book, the early test results, where the skepticism comes in, and what actually matters more than chasing an impressive words-per-minute score.

The fun part is that this wasn't just armchair theorizing. I actually started testing the techniques myself and quickly ran into the classic trade-off: higher speed, lower comprehension. Shawn (my podcast co-host), on the other hand, came in with a more skeptical lens and a faster baseline, which made for a pretty interesting discussion. You can listen to it here if you'd like.

If you've ever wondered whether speed reading is worth exploring, this blog post will probably save you a few hours, and maybe also nudge you toward the more boring but more effective tool: just read consistently.

The big idea

The main question is simple:

• Can you read faster and still understand what you read?
• And even if you can, is that the right goal in the first place?

That sounds like a tiny distinction, but it's really the main point.

Because reading faster is only useful if comprehension stays high enough to make the reading worthwhile. Otherwise, you are basically turning books into a timed obstacle course. Great for your ego, not so great for actually learning something.

Same goes for those 15-min book summaries - it's only good for deciding if you actually want to read the book or not.

My experiment: faster... but worse?

What got me interested in this topic in the first place was pretty straightforward: I love reading, but I often feel like I read painfully slowly.

So I picked up an old Tony Buzan book I had lying around and did the built-in reading tests.

My first result:

• 194 words per minute
• 73% comprehension

After revisiting some of the techniques, I did another test and got:

• 267 words per minute
• 21% comprehension

And yeah... that's not exactly a glowing endorsement.

Technically, the speed improved. But if comprehension falls off a cliff, then what exactly did I win? Bragging rights with a side of confusion?

So, a rough conclusion may be: improvements that look good numerically may be useless in practice.

There may be something there, but don't worship the number

Shawn had a shorter English edition of the book, tried the basic chunking idea, and already had fairly high reading speeds in his own informal tests. But he was pretty skeptical of the more extreme claims—especially the kind where people say they can read at absurd speed with near-perfect comprehension.

And honestly, I get it.

There probably is some value in reducing unnecessary eye movement, using a guide, avoiding regressions, or becoming more intentional about how you read. But once the conversation moves into miracle territory, my internal nonsense detector starts blinking like a Christmas tree 😬

The part I still like

Even though we were skeptical about the grand claims, I still think there are a few useful ideas here:

1. Reading with focus matters more than reading fast

If you're distracted, tired, multitasking, or mentally half somewhere else, your effective reading speed is terrible no matter what the stopwatch says.

2. Some techniques may help for skimming

Using a finger, pen, or visual guide can genuinely help in certain cases—especially with tiny print or dense layouts.

3. Audiobooks are a valid multiplier

Listening at 1.5x speed during a commute can add up massively over time. That's not "speed reading" in the classic sense, but it absolutely helps you consume more material.

4. Ten minutes a day beats fantasy productivity

This may have been my favorite practical point from the whole discussion.

You don't need to become a 1,000-words-per-minute reading machine. You just need to read regularly.

Ten minutes a day doesn't sound dramatic, which is probably why it works. Compound interest is sexy only in hindsight.

So... is speed reading worth it?

My answer after this episode is:

Maybe for skimming. Probably not for deep learning. Definitely not a silver bullet.

If you're curious, experiment with it. Try the techniques. Measure your own results. See whether they help you read articles, non-fiction, or general material more efficiently.

But for anything deep like:

• technical books
• philosophy
• difficult non-fiction
• material you actually want to remember

I still wouldn't bet on speed over attention.

And that's probably the least glamorous conclusion possible, which is exactly why it may be true.

Final thought

The best reading system is the one you'll actually stick to.

Not the coolest one.
Not the most extreme one.
Not the one with the wildest marketing promises.

Just the one that gets you to sit down, pay attention, and turn the next page.

And voilà, suddenly you're the kind of person who finishes books 💪

Full podcast trancript

Shawn: Hello, and welcome back to the DevThink podcast with Shawn and Nikola.

Shawn: Today, we are talking about the topic of speed reading, which is a bit controversial. Nikola suggested we do this topic, and we both have a book. Mine has a blue cover, his has a red cover, same author. And I will let Nikola explain why he forced me to do this.

Nikola: So why I forced you, Shawn, to do it is because I wanted to force myself to do it. Because it's actually also as in exercising, you're determined. You wanna do it. You're like, okay. You know what?

Nikola: As of next week, I'm gonna exercise. And then you go about it. You do it for the first week, the second week. And then, you know, you start skipping blah blah blah, and all of a sudden, you're not doing it anymore. What I found is that having a workout partner is an awesome thing because one day you may not feel like it, and then the guy just comes to your house and you have to exercise because, you know, you had an agreement, and there's no backing out of that.

Nikola: Right? And then next day, maybe he's not, you know, quote, unquote, feeling it, but then you're like, you call him up. Hey, dude. You know, no skipping. And that's why I think doing this and, of course, other things that we'll be doing is good to have a partner in crime, quote, unquote.

Nikola: So that's why I made you do it. And the other reason is obvious. Like, I really like as in love reading, but my reading speed is so freaking slow or small that it's embarrassing and yeah, so I have this book by Tony Buzan, I hope I didn't pronounce this wrong, for a very long time from like, I think it's from 02/2009 that I have it, but back in the day, then I got maybe even halfway through the book, and I do remember that my reading speed improved, but since I didn't practice it in that way, it just, let's say vanished. Anyways, long story short, I read first four chapters of this book, and so I did my first intro test of that actually tests what's your reading speed and comprehension, and my first result was 194 words per minute with the comprehension of 73%. And then I went to learn about these few techniques, which of course I remembered, because, you know, I read this part of the book several years ago.

Nikola: But the funny thing happened, was that my reading speed on the second test was 267 words per minute, but the comprehension was remarkably low, 21%. So I don't know. There's that, honestly. So I am gonna, as with other things, I'm gonna go through this whole book and then see how my reading speed improves or not but, you know, I'll see. I also can't say that when I read claims that some people read 1,000 words per minute with 80% or higher comprehension, all I can say is: hey, I believe you, but I kind of envy you more than I believe you.

Nikola: So I don't know. What's your take on this, Shawn?

Shawn: Well, I did a shortened version because, unbeknownst to either of us, the English version of the book, you have the Croatian copy, that I bought, which was published we we chose one for me that was closest in publication date to yours. And it turns out I got an abbreviated book of under a hundred pages that only has one timed exam with comprehension questions, so it doesn't really make it possible for me to measure my comprehension before and after. But it probably does have all the techniques, even if it doesn't go into as much detail. And I went through the book, and I had already read about speed reading years ago, and the main thing that I took away from it was the idea that instead of running your eyes across the whole line, that you look at the whole line in one or two or three chunks, depending I guess depending on the width of the the line of text. And when your eyes stopped, you can read all the words that are directly in your vision.

Shawn: And that when you're moving your eyes, you're not seeing. It's only when your eyes stop. So if you look at every single word and there are 10 words, your eyes have to stop 10 times. Whereas in most books I've seen, you can easily stop three times, like a little bit past the beginning, around the middle, and a little bit before the end, and see them all. So and I even did that technique initially.

Shawn: This book told me to read something. It didn't specify what and record my reading speed, so I did it with multiple articles, just stuff I had in my bookmarks that I'd been meaning to read anyway online. And my scores ranged from four twenty to 455 words per minute. They were actually 420, 506, 540, and 555. And I basically went through the whole book, didn't bother to practice any of the weird things that he recommended, which are like trying to scan multiple lines at once and move across the page in like a diagonal back and forth pattern where sometimes, you know, for about half the text, you'd be kind of looking at the ends of the sentences on one or more lines, and then the middles and then the beginnings and kind of putting them together backwards, and that just seemed silly to me. So I didn't do that.

Shawn: So I didn't do that. And I just kind of flipped through the rest of the book. I did the official test in here, which was a 1,871 word challenge. And I did that in 428 words per minute, and my comprehension score was 66.666 on a multiple choice quiz, which probably isn't that great, but I was rushing through it because, you know, I was concerned more about my time than anything else. But in doing a little bit of separate research, looking into some things he said, for example, he said you should have kind of a pointing device, a a card or a ruler or something that you put down under the line you're reading line by line because the less because that'll draw your eyes focus.

Shawn: And the less movement of your eyes, the more efficient you will be and the faster you'll be able to read. And if you your eye has to also pay attention to where it is vertically on the page, it's a little more effort, it might make you take longer. And he mentioned in the book that aside from your finger or a ruler, there are also specialty devices made just for this purpose. And I did a Google search looking for it and did not find any such product because as soon as I Googled for it, I found a whole bunch of blog posts and articles about speed reading and these techniques written by various people and kinda made it sound like, to a certain extent, it's really a sham, that it doesn't really produce, anywhere near a thousand words per minute with comprehension and that it's just basically, you know, those it's like snake oil. It's it's like a weight loss, thing.

Shawn: You say, hey. Here's a trick for losing weight. And then if you fail, you think, I'm just, you know, a loser. And I think it's a lot of things like that. People who struggle say, "Oh, I want to learn how to read really fast."

Shawn: Or, "I want to learn a language." And then they do it, and they try this technique, and they maybe pay money, and then they fail. And then they think, well, it's because I'm bad at languages, or I'm stupid, or I'm lazy, when they don't realize a lot of these techniques are just snake oil. So I think in this case, this guy Tony Buzan, who I knew of previously because he's very involved in memory challenges and championships, and he is a shameless self promoter who is eager to write and sell books on any topic that can make him money. So I think this is just, you know, there's a little something to it, you know, if you learn the chunking and you maybe read over the techniques if they help you.

Shawn: But I would not get hung up on a number. I would say that probably for you, for each individual, you have some kind of range where you can read comfortably and have comprehension. And it's possible that because of the way you were taught to read, things like sub vocalization, which you can read about if you look up speed reading, it might be possible you can improve it a bit. And if you like to do that, go ahead. But in reality, I mean, let's take running for example.

Shawn: I will never be able to run as fast as Olympic athletes, and I have a range, which I my body can run due to my length of my legs and my height and things like that, even if I lost a bunch of weight and got in shape. And we're just not all equal. It doesn't make us insufficient. It still makes us it doesn't make us average. There's a difference between average and normal most people don't think about.

Shawn: And I think that reading speed is not something that I would get hung up on, especially, as Nikola has drilled into me. If, for example, you want to read, but you say, "I don't have time to read a book." A book's long. He would say, well, read ten minutes a day, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you do all the math, how many pages a day, how many pages a month at the end of the year, you could have read 10 or 15 books that you wouldn't have read otherwise.

Shawn: And if you think about probably most people listening to this are at least adults who might look back over the last five or ten years, they wish they had read more. And if they had read ten minutes a day for those, you know, five or ten years, they would have read, you know, close to a hundred books or more by now, extra on top of what they did. So I say, who cares about your reading speed? Just read.

Nikola: Oh yeah, indeed, indeed. So this concept of compound interest is unbelievable, right? And also, so you said ten minutes a day, but here's like of course, don't know the exact numbers. I believe Brian Tracy is where I first heard that term. I mean, the idea is listen to audio books in your car when you're driving.

Nikola: And he had this amount of hours that you listen to. And if I'm not mistaken, the amount of hours that an average person spends in the car per year amounted to a number of hours that a full time student would spend in the full year. So imagine that, for example, my commute before when I was commuting was one hour in both ways. So one hour per day of listening to a book. And of course, if I mean, I'm not a native speaker, but I could listen to most of the books on 1.5 x, so that's like even faster, right?

Nikola: And for a native speaker, I mean, I bet that you can listen to two X speed without losing any comprehension or anything. Some people claim that they do three X, but honestly, I mean, come on. Let's be real. Right? Again, it depends on the speed, of the narrator because some books were literally narrated very slowly. So it could be that there you could listen to three x, but I found that in my case, it was 1.5 in, for most of them. So, yeah, you mentioned, for these techniques, you mentioned using the finger or something to track. Sure, that I think it's a good one, especially I found this to be useful in books that have very small print or that they are very you know you know those pocketbooks. Right? They are found that useful.

Nikola: So that jumping thing that you mentioned, they actually, in the literature, they call it, saccades. In the literature, they call it saccades, in case someone wants to look it up. And also one important thing that at least I took away from, this is never go back. You know? Make it a conscious effort that you're reading with your mind what you're reading, but don't ever go back because that will kind of, let's say signal to your brain, hey, you know what, pay freaking attention.

Nikola: So I mean, as I said, I'm, like, nowhere near the end of the book still, but you did mention, going, like, in zigzag through the page, and I did, like, scroll through the book, and I saw that. And like, honestly, to be honest, that sounds like way woo woo to me, but then again, you know how in general, yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, am that I will give it a go and then I will see if it works for me or not.

Shawn: Yeah, maybe. Like he does say and I don't have I have a little bit of experience reading music but only on the bass clef not on treble or on two simultaneously like a piano player would. But he does mention that it's similar to this zigzag pattern is similar to the way that a musician reads music. So maybe there's something that I am not aware of. And yep.

Shawn: So, yeah, it looks like your book and mine both have the same graphics. Mine has it split across two pages, and yours has it on one. But yeah. And then you did say something about paying attention to what you're reading, and that was definitely a big deal. Like, if you're distracted, if you are hearing the TV in the next room or you start thinking you read something that gives you an idea and you start thinking about something you wanna do or something you wanna email or some other book you wanna buy, then of course, it's gonna slow you down.

Shawn: So but I mean that goes for anything that requires any concentration.

Nikola: Yeah. And you know what? When you mentioned that you didn't find any tools for the actual books, I would say that, you know, the only tool is maybe a pen or a sheet of paper that you kind of slowly scroll down as you're reading, but actually, since both you and I are using computers for the majority of our time each week, I actually used a few of the apps, actually they weren't even apps, they were Chrome plugins or even Firefox. I mean, if you have it for one browser, they probably have it for another browser too that you take a sheet of, I mean, of, you take some article or whatever, and for this plugin, you just click Start and you then determine what kind of a reading speed would you like to read this text through?

Nikola: Do you want to be shown two, three, four words at a time or just one word? And you can literally specify things like that, and that may help if you're really getting into this speed reading thing. Don't know, have you tried this kind of thing?

Shawn: Haven't done that but what I have done on many occasions is I wrote a little script that if I take some text and save it to a text so I'll like highlight the text out of a blog post or something, paste it into a file and run my command against it, it will create a text-to-speech recording using an open source tool, and then I convert it to a FLAC file and then I'll listen to it and I can listen to it at a higher rate of speed. And another thing I do is this: it's an open source tool. It doesn't have as good of, voice selection as you might have like on the Mac for example. You know, it's not as clear as Siri. So but it does have multiple voices, and I selected, I think, three or four of the ones that I thought were easiest for me to listen to.

Shawn: And my code makes a separate recording for every paragraph with a different voice. So it alternates over the voices for every time there's a blank line, you know, a white line between, paragraphs. So that also helps it be less monotonous and maybe a little bit easier to listen to or keep your focus. Because it's also very easy with audiobooks and podcasts and with this to put it on. And then while it's on, you're, like, browsing other websites or checking your email, in which case you're not really hearing it.

Shawn: So you could certainly listen to audiobooks for two hours a day and not get much out of it because your attention will be wandering.

Nikola: Yeah, indeed. So this whole idea of multitasking has been debunked over and over again.

Nikola: We're going to talk again when I go through the whole book. Hopefully my speed at least stays where it is, but comprehension, please go higher, and we'll see.

Shawn: Or you could try to intentionally read a little more slowly and see where your comprehension is because I'm sure you'd give up, you know, 10 or 20 words a minute for increased comprehension.

Nikola: Yeah. Although, like, to be perfectly honest, I was probably not as concentrated or whatever because this week, I don't know how I sound, I was quote unquote kinda sick, I was actually sick. So maybe that had a thing to do with it. So the next reading challenge that I'm going to have, and I have 60% comprehension, I'm going to be, oh, yes, this works. I'm kidding.

Nikola: Of course. We'll see.

Shawn: Yep. Alright. So, gonna wrap this one up.

Nikola: Sure. Sure. So, anyways, I hope that, you know, those of you who are at least toying with the idea of speed reading, hey. My advice is always, you know, if you want to check something out, don't listen to us. Check it for yourself, you know, and you will see.

Nikola: Maybe you will be blown away. Maybe you will be doing 1,800 words per minute, and thus being, if I'm not mistaken, the best, person on the planet that can do that. Anyways, let us know, And good luck.

Shawn: Yeah. Just to reiterate, yeah, I I went through the book, but I did not do I spent zero minutes practicing any of the techniques, so I'm not basing my I'm not dismissing it based on the fact that I think it doesn't work. I'm because I tried it, I'm basing it because I don't I think it doesn't work because I looked around and it seems like that's the consensus of people and who have put some thought into it and who have attempted it. So, just because I poo poo it doesn't mean that it's something you should ignore.

Nikola: Oh, yeah. So, like, you've totally nailed it because even from 02/2009 when I first tried it, and I was like really into it, the thing is if you're not deliberately, so again we're mentioning the term deliberate practice, so if you're not deliberately reading a certain material in this kind of way, you will just lose the technique and you will lose it. You know? And then again, I have to say: you would most probably never want to use this kind of technique to learn something deeply. Honestly, I don't think you would.

Shawn: Yeah, it's good for skimming and then you know what you when you're done going through the book, you can put it to yourself and say I'm going to refer to this and now I know exactly when I'm going to need it. Or you can say, can get rid of this book because it really didn't have that much for me and I could use the space on my shelf for something else.

Nikola: Awesome. Agreed. Anyways, that's it guys. Hope you liked it. See you next time.

Shawn: Alright. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast. To reach us for feedback, show suggestions, or any other comments, email us at info at DevThink.

Shawn: That's d-e-v-t-h dot I-n-k.