Is Speed Reading the answer to information overwhelm?

Well many people believe that to be the case and here is why:

Part of the problem with information overwhelm is not necessarily the volume because although that is a big factor what might be manageable for you might be far too much for me.

No the key factor is how we respond to that volume and only once it gets past the "too much" stage does overwhelm start to take hold.

A few years ago, before the explosion of information on the internet (how on earth did we manage before the WWW I will never know!), one of the "treatments" for a case of information overwhelm was attending a speed reading course.

The theory goes something like this:

Too much to read and not enough time - well if you read faster then you can get through far more and much quicker thus saving you time.

Now that was true back in the good old days when even having a mobile phone was considered the height of sophistication.

Of course the theory of Speed Reading is essentially about taking away bad reading habits that slow you down (habits by the way that you were taught to have in school!), giving you a set of better habits to have you reading more in tune with the way your eyes and brain naturally work and then showing you how to incorporate those habits in your reading practice.

It works. 

Check out my post "Speed Reading Techniques - Do They Work" for the proof.

But just being able to read faster is no longer all that is needed for information overwhelm.

Recently I made a statement on my site that said:

 "the efficiencies, effectiveness and increased productivity required by today's knowledge worker are simply not possible by just working harder or reading faster."

In a soon to be published interview with Mind Mapping Software Expert Chuck Frey, he challenged me on this and asked me to explain myself.

Here is what I told Chuck:

"Well the simple answer is that to be effective you need to work smarter. 

It doesn’t matter how fast I learn to read, and already I am a pretty impressive reader with high reading speeds, I will still never get through all of the information available to me even in my own small niche.

Even applying all of the tools, tricks, skills, cheats and short cuts of speed reading, there will still be more left to read at the end of the day.

So the skill today is about knowing “what is enough?” and “where to find it” and being savvy enough that when you do dip into the raging torrent to go fetch the stick you need, you resurface and come back to the bank again before you are swept too far downstream.

This is where the clarity, the discipline, the decisiveness and the persistence come into their own.

Reading faster just means it takes just a few more pages to reach that feeling of overwhelm and being out of control – but probably in the same amount of time as before.

Now I am not saying don’t learn to speed read because having that skill, when you define what the finite amount of reading is that you have to do, will save you an amazing amount of time. 

But being an effective reader where you also have a range of filtering strategies before you even get to the conventional “reading” part is far more powerful and a good Effective Reading course will give you those.

However those strategies really only work at their best if you have clarity, discipline, decisiveness and persistence."

Let me know what you think.