Have you read the mind-expanding book ‘The Four Hour Work-Week’, by Tim Ferris? It’s definitely worth a read, whether a 4-hour work week is your goal or not.

In the book, Tim talks about a speed reading course he taught, and, lo-&-behold, I stumbled upon a web site that gives a basic breakdown on how to improve your reading speed, and comprehension.

It’s on the blog part of Tim’s site, and when you decided to invest 20 minutes in improving your reading, you will find this to be an excellent tool.

As I have decided to improve my reading speed and comprehension, so I can read all the marvellous things out there that I really want to read, I thought it might be fun to keep an online diary of my progress as I work through the exercises every day.

Day 1:

Reading Speed before = 312 words per minute (wpm)

Reading Speed after = 564 wpm

Day 2:

Reading Speed before = 336 wpm

Reading Speed after = 660 wpm

Note – I noticed that my comprehension was improving as I did each exercise twice before moving on to the next one.

Day 3:

Reading Speed before = 360 wpm

Reading Speed after = 680

I began experimenting with the web site http://eyercize.com today, to see how much retention I can get, and if it is a faster way for me to improve my reflex training. I noticed that starting out reading at 660 wpm, it was very difficult to follow all of the copy, however, when I dropped the speed down to 550 wpm, it was slow enough that I was waiting for the words. Interesting.