Reading speed strikes me similarly to typing speed when it comes to programming. It's fun to read/type fast, but it's not really the bottleneck.
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 :-)
I feel like we're losing a lot of time and potential due to filler pages.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I suppose the gamble is that it's hard to know which nonfiction are mostly fluff in advance though.
Being able to type 30~40 WPM is good enough though, no need to be super speedy.
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 :-)
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.)
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.
However, if your spending most of the day emailing people extreme accuracy is effectively pointless.
The latter seems a good strategy for coping with the former, does it not?
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.
The search and copy suggests method they're not using their tools to their best extent.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.