The best way to speed read is if the writer reduces the number of words required to communicate and educate. Of course this takes extra effort, and is also goes against human perception of value. E.g. if you reduced Tim Ferris's book to a single sheet of A4 you could get the point across, but who's going to pay $20 or so for a sheet of A4? Well some execs might pay $2000 - but you won't sell millions of copies like that. Anyway...

To sum it up that book:

To work fewer hours per week in the long term, set up a business, and figure out how to automate, speed up and delegate as much of the work as possible. Imagine a few cool inspiration inducing anecdotes alluding to a cool lifestyle. Read elsewhere for the bit about how to set up a successful business in the first place, or the details of how to automate and delegate effectively.

There you go - 200 or so pages you don't need to read :-)

That's something I've been wondering about. How many non-fiction books could be reduced by 90% and still communicate 90% of the ideas?

I feel like we're losing a lot of time and potential due to filler pages.

I read a book that could literally be summed up in a sentence (it was called "the asshole rule" or something similar, and the gist was "don't hire assholes"). There was nothing at all in addition to that, except for a bunch of feel-good anecdotes and specious data that misrepresented correlation for causation.

I hated it so much that I made a (now defunct) website where I would post summaries of these books so people wouldn't have to be subjected to all the filler.

Sounds like the book was doing something different though. Why should you believe that one sentence? The author has to sell you on the idea and demonstrate why it is a bad idea to hire assholes. A singular sentence isn't going to be enough to convince you, and it shouldn't be.

I'd want a definition of 'asshole' as well, and a ranking of asshole characteristics to weigh against positive traits, and how to correct them where possible. The topic does warrant more than just a sentence.

Content bloat with needless crap seems to have happened to novels, movies and tv shows. It’s interesting to read penguin classics - maybe they don’t represent their respective eras, but they are usually (very subjectively) quite short.

Don’t forget music, tutorials, HN long winded comments, and every single other form of medium in which someone is selling you something.

A lot of non-fiction is about trying to make a case or prove some thesis. As such, a book may try to show lots of evidence, deal with many potential counter arguments, or demonstrate that different lines of analysis lead to the same conclusion. If you become convinced of the thesis early on a lot of the book can seem redundant.

When I find myself in such a position I usually just stop reading but include the ideas I got out of it in my notes. Later, if I find myself needing the details I skipped, it's easy to go back.

Business books (most good writing actually) are frontloaded. The first paragraph tells you the gist, the first page the important ideas, the first chapter most of what the book has to offer. The rest is there to go into detail and support that first chapter with facts arguments and anecdotes.

But here’s the kicker: you often won’t fully grok the first chapter if you don’t read the rest. (or don’t already know it from other sources)

It’s interesting that you specify non-fiction, presumably since part of the point of reading fiction is the process of reading itself rather than simply the plot that unfolds. But of course, that’s also true of non-fiction books. Many people probably enjoy the process of reading Tim Ferris’ books.

>It’s interesting that you specify non-fiction, presumably since part of the point of reading fiction is the process of reading itself rather than simply the plot that unfolds

there's all sorts of "reduced Shakespeare" - most of it more parody than summary, but there is a tradition of summarizing literature and fiction, and the results are not always devoid of literary merit on their own.

There are "X for busy people" series that provide abbreviated summaries of the core ideas in popular works of nonfiction.

I suppose the gamble is that it's hard to know which nonfiction are mostly fluff in advance though.

That's what Reader's Digest did: summarize.

Yes, in that sense Wikipedia is one of the greatest human achievement. I wish it had been around when I grew up!

These guys [0] do what you're talking about. They digest non fictional books, summarize them and even turn them into audio books. Quite good to go straight to the main points without missing anything important.

[0] https://www.blinkist.com/

One way to verify your thesis is to read summary books. If they do it diligently and industriously, all books will look alike and contain just common senses. Like Blinkists ;)

I've worked with some programmers who were so slow at typing I would find myself reluctant to help them with their "hands on" work, like directing them to try something in the REPL for example, or even just asking them to run a shell command. It was a struggle for me not to excuse myself as soon as possible once they started typing. They seemingly couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name, etc.

Being able to type 30~40 WPM is good enough though, no need to be super speedy.

One of the best courses I ever took was a 2 week summer school class in typing in the 8th grade. We were taught to touch type on a heavy mechanical typewriter where you really had to hammer the keys.

Those few hours have paid off enormously for me. Not having to look at the keys while typing about doubles the speed. The letters painted on my keys have long since worn off anyway :-)

> One of the best courses I ever took was a 2 week summer school class in typing in the 8th grade. We were taught to touch type on a heavy mechanical typewriter where you really had to hammer the keys.

In my school, we had a full semester of touch-typing on mechanical keyboard in both the 7th and 8th grades. Everyone had to take it.

I had a couple of friends who, like me, were very interested in computers and programming. But instead of taking the opportunity to hone a skill that they knew they'd be using several hours a day for the next 60 years of their life, they screwed around, and left the class hunt-and-pecking as much as they ever had; and as far as I know they do that to this day. It never made any sense to me -- like, you have to be here anyway, why not just get something out of it instead of being bored?

(I meanwhile practiced with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on my home computer until my speed drills were consistently between 90 and 100 WPM.)

> In my school, we had a full semester of touch-typing on mechanical keyboard in both the 7th and 8th grades.

It's good they offered the class, but two full semesters of it sounds like terribly inefficient teaching.

What's funny is I don't know what many of the commands are for my text editor. But my fingers know. Sometimes I'll just watch my fingers to see what the command is, but I have to be careful - when I think too much about "what is the command" my fingers forget it.

A big part of this is what kind of measurement your doing. I can easily boost my typing speed with a few errors. However, I would much rather type at 99.98% accuracy at 35WPM when programming or doing data entry than 80WPM at even 99.9% accuracy.

However, if your spending most of the day emailing people extreme accuracy is effectively pointless.

> couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name

The latter seems a good strategy for coping with the former, does it not?

it's more like a pathological workaround.

it's similar to people who spend years doing "hunt and peck" typing. if you practice enough, you can get up to a decent speed, but you would have been much better off taking a couple weeks to become a mediocre touch typist.

I was a mediocre touch typist, and then spent many years doing hands on, IT support. I usually had to type on other people's keyboards while I was offset to one side, or even on the other side of the desk. I'm now a terrible touch typist, but a pretty good upside down, one handed typist!

A far better solution would be setting up their IDE to have autocomplete enabled, no time searching for variables, as they come up with the first few letters entered.

The search and copy suggests method they're not using their tools to their best extent.

It requires more effort and more precision. So I'll say no. Having trouble with something and compensating by doing a more difficult task is only a good coping strategy when it's something you very rarely have to do.

I think it's good practice to copy variable names in order to avoid typos, at least in plain text editors.

Usually you can just start typing and then use some kind of automatic completion, much more efficient than hunting down multiple variables in code and copying them.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

This applies to surprisingly many tasks in life.

That said, I've been pushing to hit 100 wpm typing with minimal typos for years just because it's a nice round number and I keep ending up just shy. Character typos aren't even that big of a deal, as I find a good chunk of mistakes are actually "thought-os" where I type in the completely wrong giraffe. So being able to recover dynamically from misakes is valuable too.

I wonder why some people type faster. If tested, I average around 125 wpm in reasonable tests (625 cpm really). I've never tried to learn to type quickly. I've never had anything beyond a $10 keyboard and I don't even type like it's taught (my hands overlap on some characters). Despite that I type quite fast with few errors - most of my mistakes are also related to typing in something completely different. It was quite shocking to me when I found out that my friends typed at below 80 wpm when trying to type fast.

Did you learn the proper technique at an early age?

As in not looking at the keyboard and using all 10 fingers.

This is what I did and I feel it has been a huge advantage for me.

Pretty sure you meant giraffe instead of giraffe, but I may be misaken ;-)

This is true to some degree.

I'd like to think of a better analogy.

Typing in programming is like running in soccer.

It's definitely a problem if you type slowly or can't type for a long period of time.

Passing the certain speed and endurance, typing faster doesn't help much.

It's the same with soccer.

I think it's like Amdahl's Law. Programming is thinking followed by typing. If you spend half your time thinking and half your time typing, then doubling your typing speed will increase your programming speed by a third. But doubling it again will only increase your programming speed by a sixth, and even with infinite typing speed, you've only doubled your programming speed.

Time spent typing might not be a bottleneck, but I think latency between thinking and having code can be. Typing quickly isn't the only way to reduce that latency though.

I disagree, reading speed at full comprehension level can slow you down and accelerate everything you do.

I'm an extremely slow reader and that has been a major bottleneck in my life, it has slowed me down in everything I do and everything I've been interested in.

Bill Gates is rumored to read several books per weeks and fully understand and remember most details. That in itself isn't enough to have made him who he is, but I'm sure it helps. If I could get one thing from him that's what I'd pick, yes over money and programing abilities, reading slowly is that delibitating.

Yeah, certainly. That's why I said "not really" instead of an absolute statement, to leave room for cases like that (and I probably should've been more clear). But for the most part input speed isn't the bottleneck that people get stuck at indefinitely.

And it's also possible for this to change. With programming, for example, if you lose the use of a hand, you quickly find out typing speed is the new bottleneck.

Actually, I'd say they're different because of their position in cache. The reason it doesn't work for reading unfamiliar material is that you don't have the information yet. You need to assimilate to build the picture. In fact, I recall speed reading material I was familiar with and absolutely achieving significant comprehension.

Writing is different. Increasing throughput almost has continuous gains all the way to blitting to computer. This makes sense. Everything is hot cached. Right now everything between my thoughts and the machine is just in the way.

And like programming the biggest speedup comes from the letters never typed/read. Quality matters so much more.

Being quick on the keyboard is about reducing friction. The faster I can physically manipulate an idea in space and the more automatic it is, the less cognitive overhead I have to waste on the process. If you work with a keyboard you will be well served by mastering that tool.

Between documentation, comments, issues, miscellaneous emails, and chat, I would be shocked if half the typing I do for a living is actual source code.

I can't imagine doing this job without fast and accurate typing, just like I can't imagine sharing this comment if it took me longer than 45 seconds to type it out.

It has its uses, but you aren't going to speed read poetry, literature, etc and get much out of it. The same thing with memory maps and other tricks. They have their limited uses, but aren't a panacea for learning and knowledge.

It depends on what you're programming as well. I suspect for cases when you can type faster than you think you'd be able to use a macro or some IDE snippet feature for it.