PhD skills 101: Speed Reading
Since reading lots of papers and books is crucial in a PhD, speed reading seems like an obvious skill to pursue.
Usually, the faster you read, the less you understand. Still, speed reading can be useful when you just want to do that first-passage skimming to get a general sense of the text, or to check if a paper is worth reading at all.
I learned that my two biggest reading “time-wasters” are subvocalization (consciously ”hearing” the words in your mind) and regression (going back to re-read a passage of text). I found that I do this a lot, even when I have understood the text perfectly - it seems it’s just a bad habit I somehow developed. Practicing speed reading has helped me to overcome this to a certain extent.
I also find that speed reading is a nice way to train my concentration - usually I want to stop after just 5 minutes into it, but I try to push through and not let my mind wander away...
I use Spreed, which is a nice Chrome extension, to read articles and papers on the web. You can also copy+paste the text. There’s also a nice iPad app I use to read articles I store on Pocket and such, called ReadQuick.
Lastly, you can test your speed reading skills here. What speed do you read? It seems I can read 419 words per minute, which is slightly below the average college student... *sigh*... It looks like I must keep practicing...