I juggle between responsibilities, and often wonder how I can make myself learn and do things faster. Here are 3 hacks I’ve picked up over the course of the years to help me learn faster, be more efficient and churn out more content quickly.
Typing Faster The average person types at about 40 wpm (word per minute). That means, for an email of around 300 words, it will take you 7.5 minutes to type. I have been practicing to type fast, and currently average between 90-105 wpm, at about 85% accuracy. This means that for the same email, I take a little over 3 minutes to finish typing it. That’s half the time spent. You can be coding or writing, but as being able to type fast allows you to churn out your content faster, and complete your tasks even faster. You can test your typing speeds here: https://play.typeracer.com/
Watching/Listening Faster For all my non-technical content (anything non-coding or non math based), I watch it on 2x speed. I do think it takes some time for your brain to get used to processing information at that speed. But its worth It once you do! I have a short attention span. So I tend to break up my lectures into a few portions, and watch about 30 minutes at a time, before I consolidate my knowledge and look over the notes I took. This has helped me through really slow (and dry) lectures which I otherwise would have snoozed through. But I will adjust my speed depending on the content and speaker, just so I won’t end up missing the core concepts I need to pick up. Typing / writing fast will come in handy when you are watching things at a faster speed too!
Reading Faster I read my books on my iPad, which allows me to reduce the size of the characters. This allows me to see more paragraphs within the screen. I read somewhere that you can train your peripheral vision to pick up the general gist of the content, which I have been trying to do. This allows me to read a lot faster, and when I spot points that I want to go through in more in-depth, I’ll slow down and read more carefully. For any noteworthy quotes I want to save, I take a screenshot or highlight it, and consolidate them in my apple notes when I’m done reading the chapter / done reading for the day! So if I were to ever look back at my past notes from my books, I’ll be able to remember the key points that I didn’t want to forget.
That said, while I do like to optimize my workflow and do things more efficiently, I take note not to do things too quickly, so I don’t end up just going through the motion and find myself re-watching or reading the whole thing.
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