How much practice does it take to increase your reading speed?

A normal man or woman has a reading speed of 200-250 words per minute. How fast can you read? You will need an online reading speed test for this. Google it and you will find many of them. Find out how fast you are.

Do you want to read faster? Probably yes. So you should learn speed reading techniques for that. Most people can at least double their reading speed if they practice regularly. Regular practice means that they do speed reading exercises every day for at least a month. You don’t have to spend several hours on it every day. 45 minutes a day will be enough, but it has to be regular.

An average office worker spends about a quarter of his working day reading. If she works 8 hours a day, she will read for 2 hours. By doubling the reading speed it is possible to save an hour each day. By increasing it three times, she will gain one hour and twenty minutes. It means that if she initially reads at 250 words per minute, then increasing her reading speed to 500 words per minute gives her a big gain, but increasing her speed to 750 words per minute doesn’t help her much.

To double your reading speed, all you have to do is take a speed reading course and keep practicing actively for an hour a day for a month. So doubling your starting reading speed will give you the biggest efficiency gains and can be achieved with a considerable amount of practice. If you train hard then you can go faster. The best speed readers can read at speeds greater than 1,000 words per minute. Being a super fast reader can be effective and you can impress your friends with it, but if you have to work really hard for it, there’s really no need to. It means that learning the basics of speed reading and putting them into practice will be enough for us.

Being as fast as a reader is not a goal in itself, but it allows you to be more productive in brain work. But there are many other factors that determine your productivity. For example, if your time management skills are poor, if you are procrastinating and wasting your work time, it won’t help you much if you can read very fast. You could be reading at 1000 words per minute and you can save time doing so, but if you take coffee breaks that are too long, you still won’t end up with much work.