A Quick and Dirty Reading Strategy When Time is Short

A week ago, I was out of town, spending time with my mother, who was very ill.  After her passing, I returned to work after about five days away.  I was greeted by a stuffed mailbox, an overflowing in-box, 700+ emails, and numerous voicemail messages.  If you’re like me, you’ve got some strategies to help hack through the backlog and get your desktop back under control — or almost under control.  One task, however, seems to stifle some executives:  Catching up on reading submitted letters, reports, professional journals, manuscripts, etc.  “To Read” piles can become mountainous if one does not bulldoze periodically. 

I tend to shy away from advice that says to start a “To Read” folder for use on airplanes, trains, and other locations when one has enough down time to read a few items.  I find that I never have enough free time to plow through the darned things.  So the file grows to outrageous proportions, where it becomes a visible reminder that I’m not “getting things done” when it comes to my required business reading.  Instead, I use a simple, yet effective way to get through some of the professional reading that we all have to do.  It’s not elegant; It’s quick and dirty, but it gets the job done for me.

Presuppositions

The first thing that one has to realize is that all reading is not the same.  Reports are written for a different purpose than articles.  Articles are written for a different purpose than letters.  Letters are written for a different purpose than proposals.  Yet, most of us try to read all types of reading materials the same way.  The first rule of plowing through reading materials is realizing that some material deserves a thorough and precise reading and some does not.  Don’t feel guilty in not giving some material deep attention if it doesn’t deserve it.

The second presupposition is that within one body of writing, all words are not important.  As a former teacher, I taught students that although their textbooks are important, it was impossible for any teacher to test them on every word that it contains.  Some words are more important than others.  The 80/20 Rule comes into effect here.  This rule states that 80% of the benefit for something comes from 20% of the work.  For sales forces, this rule says that 80% of one’s income comes from 20% of the customers.  It means that 80% of the discipline issues that a school faces come from 20% of the students.  The percentages may not be exact, but they’ll be close.  For our purposes, in any given book, 80% of the value of the book comes from 20% of the words within it.  So our first job in reading is simply to find and read the 20% of the words that contain the value that we need.  Read those and no others — unless the particular value that we require lies within that last 80%.  When that happens, we turn to deeper reading.

How To Find the Essential 20%

To get the most out of a book, report, review, etc., in the least amount of time, try this strategy:

1. Read the title of the material.
2. Read the introduction.
3. Read the Table of Contents.
4. Flip through the material, scanning the chapter titles and sub-headings.  Note the words that stand out as bold, different colors, underlined, or italicized.
5. Look at the illustrations and captions.  Look at the charts and diagrams.  Read the pull-quotes and sidebars.
6. Scan through the index looking for your particular business’ buzz words.
7. Now read the first chapter (or in a shorter work, the first paragraph).
8. Flip through the book and read the first sentence of each paragraph.  The 80/20 rule says that only 20% of each paragraph is essential.  Each paragraph should contain a topic sentence (the 20%).  The rest of the paragraph is simply support material to defend the topic sentence, examples, illustrations, etc. (the 80%).  The topic sentence is often the first sentence of the paragraph — but not always.
9. Read the last chapter (or paragraph in a shorter work).  If there is an executive summary, read it.
10. Read any other information on the cover or dust jacket.

There you have it.  You now have 80% of the information that the material contains.  You could possibly even carry on an intelligent conversation about the concepts in the book at this point.  Now, one must consider if a deeper reading is called on.  Your purpose for reading the material in the first place will determine if this strategy has given one all that one needs to know or if this was just a good introduction for a more deeper reading to mine for even more nuggets of information.  For most reading material (yep, about 80%), this is as far as it goes.  I find that about 20% of my reading requires additional deep reading.

Over the next few days, I’ll share some other strategies to help you get the best out of your business reading.  Until then, give this strategy a whirl and see if it fits you.

Comments

[Utter Doul]

I don't know if this is the appropriate place for this but, please accept my sincerest condolences on your recent loss.

[Avin]

Awesome post! Will be really helpful for me.

[John Varghese]

Wow! Excellent techniques.

[anti]

Wow.

You just reinvented "photo reading" ... which was tought to me by one of my highschool teachers 20 years ago.

Oh, wait. Photo reading is more effective.

[Bert]

Sorry, anti, this is no reinvention. These are standard techniques that we in education have been teaching students for decades(if you're new to this blog, I am an educational administrator).

If this strategy is similar to what your teacher taught you, it may be that he took these standard techniques and called them Photo Reading to encourage high school students, who are notorious for being difficult to get to read, to use them. This appeared to work for you since you remembered it. By the way, these aren't the only reading techniques that we teach students and he may have included a few more in the mix. The 10 strategies in this post are often grouped under the topic of "Prereading". We also have skimming, scanning, finding the thesis statement, determining the work's structure, questioning the author, marking the text, etc.

"PhotoReading", the product, appears to be quite different, with only some aspects the same.

I doubt that "PhotoReading", for which the home study course is available for purchase online for $530, would last for long if it only consisted of these 10 techniques, don't you?

[Eric Sohn]

Two other ways to be more efficient in your reading:

a) Read the executive summary (or the summary in the table of contents), if it exists - then decide whether or not to proceed. Just because the same idea is presented with a different spin, or by a different author, it doesn't mean that the idea is any different. Do you retry a soft-drink when the ad campaign changes?

b) Replace material with shorter equivalents, such as reading articles or book summaries instead of books. Similarly, consider using a clipping service to find relevant reading material for you.

[Sarah]

Is the dust jacket usually helpful? Many of the ones I've read seem to be pretty fast and free with the actual content of the book. Is it different for Non-Fiction? I don't read as much of that.

[Bert]

Sarah--

The dust jacket can be helpful at times, but remember, it is usually more PR than anything. The back flap (inside the book jacket) usually gives a bio of the author. I usually look at that prior to purchase to gauge the author's level of authority on the subject.

[Helen Ngo]

I found these tips are useful, especially when you are left behind the work. However, it takes time for one to practise because he/she must have a good background of knowledge/ critical thinking.

Any one could give me some advice how to speak English fluently and effectively in a short time

[Martin Masama]

I am just starting graduate school after a decade in the work environment. The volume of reading is just unbearable. On average 250 pages per week. I however need to have a conceptual grasp of the issues at hand and therefore cannot just skim through the material like that. Would the tips you provided be useful?

Stressed out