Speed, in Reading

I love my job! I get the opportunity to meet policy makers, decision makers and different kind of influencers in my industry.  I also get to be abreast of business matters across jurisdictions. It however requires a lot of travel time, being in back-to-back meetings which I am expected to have prepared ahead for. 

How do I get ahead of time? I moan to myself and my close associates how 24 hours a day is simply not enough for me to balance the volume of paperwork I have to comb through, emails I need to read and respond to, memos I have to prepare and research / presentations I have to do before my next meetings.  Where do I fit in the most important people in my life in all this workload? 

Then as fate would have it, I am now in this exciting #EMBA 28 class of the Lagos Business School (LBS). While I look forward to the learnings, every now and then, my mind drifts to the volume of study I have to complete in the next two years. It’s scary to be honest, but I wake up daily and condition my mind to find a way to create a pathway to prioritize schoolwork, as I would my work.   Then came along this course on speed reading.  I listened attentively to pick tips I could put to immediate use. 

As was discussed in class, to be functionally literate, the United Nations says we need to read at a speed of 400 words per minute (WPM)! I understand lecturers and professors recommended reading speed is 800 WPM. Simply incredible! Now, it is one thing to read at least 400 WPM and another to actually understand what has been read.  Seems almost like being between the deep blue sea and fire.  How do I read up all the LBS’ recommended articles for each MBA course, in addition to the ones from work at this recommended speed?

The learnings from the speed-reading class really helped. Vivid example from last week – I had to join a meeting last minute.  The convener somehow omitted to copy me in the email trail from the week before which required me to read a 25-page document ahead of a meeting starting in less than an hour. I could not ‘fall the hand’ of my unit. I panicked, then remembered what our facilitator, Juliet Chunu, taught us to do. I looked for a quiet room, quickly settled in, muted my phones and got to work.  Using my pen as a guide, I was able to get round the document twice.  I got an overview in my first reading and key points from my second reading. I am sure you can tell how my meeting went.

My key learnings from the course are:

• the brain does the reading, the eye is just a transmitter.
• I need to read my words in groups, avoid back-skipping and keep my mind on the pages i ned to read until I am done. 
• Remove the distractions.  Delegate any distractions or quickly deal with them, then focus on the task.

Improving the speed of my reading can only get better with constant practice, and I know I have the opportunity to prove it to myself over and over again, through application.

htuR #EMBA28