Read without the voice in your head . Oftentimes all of us read with a voice, either you vocalize and move their lips while reading or you subvocalize, which means you are silently talking to yourself in the head.

We are used to this. Turns out that you can do without it. Read visually and don’t sound them in your head.

When you’re reading (say in English) you typically read from left to right, word by word. This nature comes common to us because as a child you had to understand every word and you also read slower.

But try this, when you now look at a word, you can see more than one. That’s because our vision can accommodate more. Reading should be an activity which involves only the eyes and the brain. Vocalization ties reading to actual speaking, which is a comparatively slow activity.

I didn’t know this when I grew up and considered this a sign of being weak at reading. The best way to read fast is actually to use your finger to follow the words . When you don’t have an active object to follow, your eyes don’t move as quickly. Try both ways and see the difference for yourselves.

Change your reading speed according to what you’re reading. Average readers have the same reading pace for everything which can affect quality of comprehension. Poor readers habitually read and re-read the same phrase over and over again. This habit of making “regressions” doubles or triples reading time and often does not result in better comprehension.

Try summarizing what you know. Most people do highlights on pages, but for me I never go back to these(maybe my poor system, could improve here) but if I write my understanding of the book it helps me move on to the next and helps me retain better as well.

Using bigger font sizes are a game-changer. Using the kindle app on a large tablet did wonders for my reading speed. Also, just an addition to it that helped me recently was immersive reading, i.e.. audible at 2.1x + reading the book together. Increasing playback speed bit by bit. Also got natural readers extension for Chrome.

If there’s one reading technique that’s going to help the most, it’s improving our consistency. Consistency really is king. Just as the key to YouTube growth is posting 1-3 new videos every week, the key to reading growth is picking up our book for a small chunk of time every day. Although James Clear recommends reading 20 pages at the start of our day, I think it’s easier to set a time target of 20 minutes. And if we have an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, we’ll roughly get through a book every week by doing this. Small actions really do lead to big results