id: srw title: Speed Reading Workbook previous: tw next: gs date: 2021-07-10 ---

## Speed Reading Workbook

I have finally finished this workbook. It has languished as a pdf file only for a couple of months while I worked on other things. I wanted to have it as a functional epub file before I posted it here.

I spend a fair bit of time in the last couple weeks looking at extracted epub files to figure out their structure and the formatting that I needed to do to get everything working. It was pretty fun and like the website I really enjoyed doing it by hand.

This workbook is designed as help with practicing Tim Ferriss' speed reading technique. You can see his full explanation of it here. The workbook uses public domain text (Grimm's fairy tales) as the practice material and adds in the formatting as you work through it. Then takes it away to see if you can maintain the speed.

I chose Grimm's fairy tales because they are easy to read for a variety of reading levels. My first iteration was using some of Seneca's letters but they were too hard to follow while trying to read quickly for the first time. I decided that as much as I loved the idea of sneaking some philosophy into the workbook it detracted from the actual skill that I was trying to build.

This particular technique is one that I have been using for a few years. I mainly use it for non fiction as it is definitely a bit of a strain to keep up for any length of time, so leisure reading just doesn't fit. I find that going through a text a couple of times fast as opposed to once slowly helps with both recall and highlighting the important points. Especially if you pause to take notes once in a while and try to write down the important points without referencing the book in between readings.

After each story is a short section with the word count of the book to save time calculating your reading speed, and the last story of each section has some simple questions to get a ballpark of your retention while reading at an increased speed.

I hope that this is as useful to others as it has been to me.

Epub Download here
PDF Download here

Thanks for reading. Any feedback on this is welcome. I am looking into the possiblity of making a tool that lets you add the speed reading formatting of your choice to your own text on this website. That would let people make their own practice material if they wanted more then what was in the book.