I was initially intrigued by Leo’s suggestion of reading slower to be more productive. I am a slow reader. I can be so slow that I can fall asleep reading, which is a great activity at night. 
For someone else to suggest that reading slower is actually better is such a comforting thought, until I saw a reader’s counter argument. Then I remember why I try to learn reading faster in the first place.
The tension between reading faster and reading slower has always been a part of me whenever I read. On the one hand, i would like to read faster so that I can read a lot more in less time. On the other, I lose out on comprehension, making me skim through a lot of things that I read without fully enjoying and appreaciating what was being written.
I now follow a technique from Photoreading where I skim through the articles, reading the last paragraph first normally, and reading the first paragraph second, while taking a “snapshot” of everything in between. Then I’ll decide if it’s worth reading the whole article. The logic is that the brain tends to process things that it has seen before at a much faster rate, something to do with familiarity, like seeing an advertisement over and over again. Of course, Google Reader helped. It allows me to scroll through a lot of articles in a much faster rate compared to going from websites to websites.
However, I want to read slower. I want to know what I’m reading. I want to read only the things that I want. I wish there is an editor out there who will know exactly what I like to read. Unfortunately, I can’t afford such an editor, even if she exists. I’m not sure when technology will provide a TIVO for reading materials. So I did the next best thing. I ruthlessly dump things that I don’t like reading.
I have been going through my reading list constantly, in fact, everytime I am reading, I am editing my reads. If after a while I don’t like what I’m reading, I will unsubscribe from my feed. If after a while, I always skim through the articles, maybe because of length or content or style, I will unsubscribe. I maintain this constant editing mode while reading articles online. This has enabled me to keep my reading plate to a minimum, and allow me to read only what I like to read, without feeling the pressure that I have to “finish reading” the newspaper.
I don’t like the feeling of a forever full inbox of articles to read. I don’t like the feeling of going through the motions of skimming through them only to find out that I ignore them most of the time anyway. So I am ruthless with my readings now. I think I’m getting more ruthless everyday. I gain speed reading by doing speed dumping. I find that absolutely refreshing.
p/s: This only works for writings sent by magic (a.k.a. RSS) through the world wide web. You can’t actually dump individual writings in a traditional media e.g. newspaper or books. Of course, you can always dump the traditional media altogether, go e-everything…
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