Simple Productivity: 10 Ways to Do More by Focusing on the Essentials – lifehack.org

Parties and other social functions can really be a drag sometimes. You stand by the punchbowl or sit down on a sofa and watch everybody else mingling, but nobody seems to want to chat with you. You’re attractive, witty, and interesting; what’s wrong with these people? It could be that you’re sending out the wrong signals. No matter how beautiful you are or how good a conversationalist you can be, if you look intimidating or preoccupied, people may be afraid to talk to you. Here’s how to use your body language to look more friendly and approachable.

Steps

1.  

   

    

   

   Folded arms act as a barrier between you and the world.

   Be aware of what your body is saying. We all speak with body language, and you don’t have to actually say anything to communicate a message to others. Unfortunately, your body may not always say what you want it to. If your gestures and posture are saying “I’m too busy to talk,” or “Leave me alone,” it’s not likely people will approach you. Other people watch your body for cues, so it’s important to pay attention to what cues you’re displaying.

2. Open up. When people are uncomfortable in a situation they have a tendency to display closed body language. Examples include folding your arms in front of you, hunching over, and positioning your body so that you’re angled away from others. These signals imply that you’d rather be left alone. If you’d rather not be left alone, make sure you’re displaying open body language by angling yourself toward other people, sitting or standing with an upright (but not stiff) posture, and uncrossing your arms.
3. Use your eyes. Your eyes are not only your window to the world, they’re also other people’s window into you. If you bury your head in a book, stare at the floor, or look up at the ceiling, you close that window. This is all well and good if you don’t want to be bothered on your commute to work, but if you want to look friendly and approachable, scan your environment with your eyes, and don’t be afraid to make eye contact with people.

4.  

   

    

   

   A genuine smile uses the whole face, especially the eyes.

   Smile. A warm, inviting smile can put anyone at ease, and it also makes you look like you’re having a great time, which makes people want to be around you and get in on the fun. If you catch someone’s eye, be sure to give a little smile, and be sure to smile often during small talk. It lets people know you appreciate talking to them. Smile with your eyes. When you do make eye contact, don’t stare or glare. Instead, soften your eye expression and make your eyes “smile” or “twinkle” to show that you’re friendly and interested in talking to the other person. If you’re not sure how to smile with your eyes, get in front of a mirror and practice smiling without using your mouth. The eyes are actually more important than the mouth to what most people consider a “genuine” smile.

5.  

   

    

   

   One example of a nervous self-comfort gesture…

    

   

    

   

   and another. Unless you’re drinking from the glass, don’t hold it near your mouth. It creates a barrier between you and others.

   Beware self-comfort gestures. Nervousness manifests itself in body language in many ways. It’s okay to feel nervous, but if you really want to socialize and meet people you should be careful not to appear nervous. Touching your hand to your face, especially putting it over your mouth, or, if you have a drink, holding your glass by your mouth can give people the impression that you’re not interested in talking to them. Metronomic gestures, such as foot tapping, can signal impatience or boredom, so people may think you don’t have time to talk or aren’t interested in conversation. Other nervous habits — picking at your cuticles or biting your fingernails for instance — can also make you appear distant or lost in thought. Once again, just pay attention to what your body is saying, and you can avoid putting up these barriers.

6. Approach others. If people aren’t approaching you, why not go to them? Nothing makes you look more outgoing and approachable than actively seeking out people and talking to them. If you’re in an environment where you don’t know anybody, the longer you wait alone, the more uncomfortable you’re bound to feel.
7. Have a good time. Your body language usually communicates your deepest emotions at any given time, and it’s not easy to fake body language. The best way to look approachable, then, is to actually enjoy yourself in social interactions. If you feel anxious in social settings, or if you’re uncomfortable around people of the opposite sex, get over your anxiety by seeking out opportunities to interact with people. If you have especially strong social anxiety (a common condition), you may find it helpful to seek out counseling or talk to your doctor.

Tips

• Compliment others. It’s a great way to show interest in other people and start conversations. Most people just love getting a compliment and positive attention, and talking about themselves. Just be sure it’s sincere and appropriate. Ask follow-up questions to keep the conversation moving.
• In a social situation, such as a party, offer to help out in some way. Your host or hostess will likely be appreciative, and sometimes having a specific task may help you feel more focused than just standing around feeling awkward. It’s a great way to meet others and be sociable without having to feel you don’t know what to do. Excellent tasks: cutting vegetables, washing dishes, keeping the music going, picking up used plates, etc. Don’t over-focus and use the task as an excuse for not engaging in conversation, and vice versa.
• In uncomfortable situations, you may find that you touch your face a bit more than usual or, if you have a drink, you may hold a glass in front of your face. These are unconscious protective reactions that signals to others that you don’t want to be approached. As long as you’re aware of these gestures, however, you can avoid them.
• Reading a newspaper or wearing headphones can ease the monotony of a long train ride, but in situations where you want to look approachable, lose these props.
• Position yourself for conversation. If you’re standing up, but everybody else is sitting down (or vice versa) people will find it difficult and somewhat awkward to talk to you. If you want to talk to someone, or if you’re already talking with someone, position yourself so that you can comfortably talk.
• Do not gauge someone’s interest level based solely on how approachable or unapproachable they appear. The person may not realize what their body language conveys.
• Body language suggests a mirror issue. That is… Do you like yourself? Are you very perfectionist? Do you talk with your neighbors? To animals? Do you care for your pet? This could help to keep you aware of your actual tastes and less of the tastes of your friends.

Warnings

• There may indeed be times when you don’t want to look approachable. Closed body language can be useful to fend off potential attacks, to get rid of unwanted suitors or to tell panhandlers you don’t want to be bothered.
• Remember that it’s easy to misread body language. Next time you’re at a party and see someone huddled in a corner with arms crossed and eyes on the floor, keep in mind that they might just be uncomfortable because they don’t know anyone. Who knows? They might be an interesting person who would welcome your approach.

We’re always talking about why it is so critical to have performance measures, what is most important to measure, how to design meaningful measures, how to measure the intangible things. But there is a lot of value to knowing when measuring something just isn’t the best idea.

Don’t measure it if you have no intention of managing it.

Is it really responsible to be measuring something you have no intention of doing anything about? If it’s because you were told to measure it, then you have at least two choices.

You can talk to whoever has demanded to measure it, and in the spirit of authentic curiosity, explore their and your points of view and negotiate a more meaningful measure, or drop it entirely if your existing measures sufficiently cover the most important results you are responsible for managing.

Or you can talk to whoever has demanded to measure it, also in the spirit of authentic curiosity, ask for their help to determine what kind of response you should be taking to the measure, it’s priority over your other measures, and the guidelines for how much of your resources to throw at it when it goes south.

Don’t measure it if the cost of measuring outweighs the value of knowing.

Many data collection systems, like surveys, cost lots of money. Especially when you have to consider factors like measuring over wide geographic areas or measuring to high levels of accuracy or measuring very rare phenomena.

Get in the habit of checking if the likely gain of using the measure (like improvement in sales or reduction of waste) has a smaller net impact on the bottom line than does the cost of measuring it. If you can’t show a decent positive return on investment for measuring something, don’t bother. How else could you have used the time and money to impact your business’ or organisation’s success?

Don’t measure it for old times’ sake.

Do you take on more new measures that you let go? Letting go of measures seems to be such a psychological battle – we hang on to them because they’re already being tracked and we might need them again someday. Fine. Keep collecting the data (if it doesn’t cost too much), but stop reporting the measure!

It’s time to test if there is something more important to put that time and resource into. Perhaps to focus on other higher priority measures, or to spend some time designing more meaningful measures for your current strategy. Unimportant measures will slow you down and waste your time and energy.

Don’t measure it if it will be a big stick.

Measures have the worst reputation of being used as big sticks to beat people’s performance into shape (or to at least attempt this). Measures can be very indispensable in managing people’s performance, but the big stick approach means using measures to point blame or CYA.

You’ll see a ripple of fear and defensiveness in every direction around the one who yields such a measure, and it will build into a wave of destruction. If you don’t have a performance improvement culture, if there is a real risk that the measure will be used as a big stick, then avoid measuring it. Put the time and effort into some open and candid dialogue to explore the results that matter and how to improve them.

Don’t measure it if you’re already measuring too much.

Drowning in measures? Do you have more measures than you have time and resources to review and improve? Then don’t take on any more! Too many measures is often worse than not enough measures. Overwhelm is so much more debilitating than scarcity when it comes to measures. At least with scarcity you have the time and energy to move in the direction of a concise set of meaningful measures. But with overwhelm, you usually feel stuck and unable to move in any direction at all.

Instead of working on more measures, take stock of the measures you have already, cull those that really aren’t that important, and put your focus on just 3 or 4 measures at a time, improving performance in all results systematically.

The truth is that you probably can take the average email inbox — even a relatively neglected one — from full to zero in about 20 minutes. It mostly depends on how much you really want to be done with it. The dirty little secret, of course, is that you don’t do it by responding to each of those emails but by ruthlessly processing them. Is that how you thought this worked? Answering 500 emails in 20 minutes? Jeez, it’s no wonder you’re such a mess. Your cognitive dissonance is epic.

Here’s the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don’t have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven’t responded to — that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you’re just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can’t possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It’s all reasonable and it’s all accurate, but come on: something’s gotta give.

There’s an easy but non-obvious way to win at this Catch-22: you cheat. You rewrite the rules. You adapt at a higher level. You don’t answer them all. Not even most of them.

The other day over on the board, we were talking about “triage” and how our meaning of it in personal productivity evolves out of battlefield (or emergency room) assessments of the best way — at that given moment and considering myriad factors — to do the most with limited resources and a theoretically unlimited demand for them:

I think the roots of the term are indeed in medicine, where patients are dealt with based on one of three (hence, “tri”) statuses: those who can survive with immediate help, those who can wait, and those who won’t make it no matter what.

The fascinating thing to me about the metaphor is that the status of one patient is almost always necessarily based on the status of the others, and new additions re-jigger the equation. Just like in to-do lists.

Use your judgement about whatever best removes your blocks and gets you through the pile with your sanity intact.

Personally, I’d concentrate first on just processing based on a battlefield “biage” (is that even a word?). Delete the obvious spam, chain letters, and kitty photos. Archive the mailing lists and blog comments (sorting by subject is great for this), all the while identifying, flagging, and relocating all the actual important stuff to a “pending” folder — that’s the stuff that will take your real brain power and valuable time. Just get that sucker down to zero now. Fast. Go.

Only when you’re at zero do you return to “pending,” concentrating on short responses and generation of to-dos. Gang your work, stay in one mode, and if you start getting exhaustipated, just take a break and return by running dashes 3-5 times a day.

Understand: if you’ve really let things go, you ain’t gonna hit bottom in any 20 minutes. But be patient, and keep your eyes on the prize. This is annoying, time-consuming, mentally draining work, but as you see that count dropping and dropping, you’ll find unbelievable energy and resolve; you’ll be deleting faster and realizing that all you keep is really valuable and worthy of your time. This feels so good that you’ll never want to go back. But if you do, just get back on the horse. Process, process.

Think in shovels not in teaspoons.

Found at 43 Folders

You need to get that report finished today and a colleague comes over to the desk to talk about another project. Then you have a shedload of emails to read. A salesperson rings to tell you about a conference that has not sold enough places. By the end of the day the report is still unfinished and you stay late to finish it whilst everyone else goes home or to the pub. What to do?

Emails and phone are easy to deal with. You can switch them off. This rarely works with people. Consider whether an interruption is useful or a distraction. Often the unscheduled chat is very useful and more time-efficient and timely than a formal meeting scheduled for two weeks time. Things get done. Therefore try to schedule periods when you are available to talk.

When you want to shut out the world put on earphones. Even if you are not listening to anything most people understand the clear signal that you are unavailable.

Failing that a Do Not Disturb sign can work. Just don’t expect the boss to pay any attention to it!

Snooze, You Win
According to new studies, nothing tunes up mind and body like a good nap. But there’s an art to catching the right kind of z’s.

When billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett broke the record for around-the-world solo jet flight last March, he slept just 60 minutes in 67 hours of flight time — 60 minutes broken into two- and three-minute naps. “I slept when I needed it and awoke refreshed,” he says. Fossett, who holds world records in ballooning, sailing, and flying, adds that none of his feats could have been done without these micro-variety “power naps.”

So what makes a power nap effective? Think of it as an investment with the greatest return in the least amount of time, a kind of super-efficient sleep that fits nicely in a high-pressure schedule: say, between business meetings or in the minutes before a game.

Napping in general benefits heart functioning, hormonal maintenance, and cell repair, says Dr. Sara Mednick, a scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies who is at the forefront of napping research. A power nap, says Mednick, simply maximizes these benefits by getting the sleeper into and out of rejuvenative sleep as fast as possible. No surprise that Lance Armstrong’s coach, Chris Carmichael, says that “naps were critical in his overall training plan.” In Manhattan, napping has become a lucrative business: MetroNaps in the Empire State Building provides darkened cot-like redoubts that attract Broadway actors between shows as well as investment bankers who otherwise would fall asleep at their desks. And in Iraq, U.S. Marine commanders have mandated a power nap before patrols.

Here’s how the power nap works: Sleep comes in five stages that recur cyclically throughout a typical night, and a power nap seeks to include just the first two of them. The initial stage features the sinking into sleep as electrical brain activity, eye and jaw-muscle movement, and respiration slow. The second is a light but restful sleep in which the body gets ready — lowering temperature, relaxing muscles further — for the entry into the deep and dreamless “slow-wave sleep,” or SWS, that occurs in stages three and four. Stage five, of course, is REM, when the eyes twitch and dreaming becomes intense.

The five stages repeat every 90 to 120 minutes. Stage one can last up to 10 minutes, stage two until the 20th minute. Extenuating circumstances, like manning the controls of a jet, aside, experts believe that the optimal power nap should roughly coincide with the first 20 minutes in order to give you full access to stage two’s restorative benefits. In addition to generally improving alertness and stamina, stage two is marked by a certain electrical signals in the nervous system that seem to solidify the connection between neurons involved in muscle memory. “It’s like a welding machine,” says Mednick. “When you wake up, your neurons perform the same function as before, but now faster and with more accuracy,” making the 20-minute nap indispensible to the hard-working athlete looking to straighten out his putter or baseline shot.

Mednick’s most recent research also shows that power naps can lift productivity and mood, lower stress, and improve memory and learning. In fact, Mednick has found through MRIs of nappers that brain activity stays high throughout the day with a nap; without one, it declines as the day wears on. Tell that to the boss next time he finds you passed out at your desk.

There is, however, a pitfall in all this sleeping around. You have to carefully time the duration of your nap in order to avoid waking in slow-wave sleep. This can produce what’s known as sleep inertia. That’s when the limbs feel like concrete, the eyes can’t focus, the speech is slurred, the mind is sluggish. Sleep inertia can ruin your day. You must keep the nap to 20 minutes or slightly less, and if you need the extra sleep, wait until the 50-minute mark. This will safely keep you on the power side of your nap.

Found at: MJ PEAK PERFORMANCE: Snooze, You Win – Improve your mental and physical performance by power napping

According to the 2003 Census report, the average commute time is 38 minutes each way for some parts of the country. That is 76 minutes each day, over 6 hours per week or 41 work days each year. If you live somewhere that has a long commute time, it is easy to see how much time is just spent driving back and forth.If you were able to eliminate the commute even one day per week, you would save over 65 hours per year. That is over 8 work days of time or equivalent to an extra 1.5 weeks of vacation.

There are three basic ways to eliminate or shorten your commute:

1. Start your own business.
2. Telecommute and work for your current employer from home.
3. Switch to a shorter work week.

Switching to a shorter work week is a nice possibility, but for this article, lets assume that working from home is technically possible and concentrate on a strategy to get your boss to say “yes”. There is no magic formula, but if you follow these five steps, it will go a long ways toward increasing your odds for success.

1. Stealth Mode Research – The Technology

Before you even approach your boss, you need to make sure you understand what technology infrastructure is required for you to work from home. If you work in IT, this may be a no-brainer for you–just skip to the next item.

The best way to investigate your options is to try to start doing some work from home in the evenings. At this point you don’t have to tell anyone why you are doing this, but it gives you a chance to work through the process of working from home and minimizes the road blocks once you approach your boss.

Most companies have several options for people to work from home over a broadband connection. Usually these are used by a few people and may not be widely promoted. Here is a checklist of things you should look for:

• The ability to check your email from home.
• The ability to get access to your files from home.
• Access to company wide software from home.
• Call forwarding that allows you to send your desk phone to your cellphone.
• A voicemail system with an external number to check messages.

Take what you’ve learned and try to work a couple hours each week from home in the evenings. This preparation is vital in crafting a proposal that won’t immediately get rejected. The extra effort you are putting into doing work in the evenings will also make it easier for your boss to say yes which is part of step number two.

2. Positioning Yourself for Success

Before you tell anyone what you want to do, you need to make sure you are positioned as an ideal employee. Think about it from your bosses perspective. Who would you be more likely to let work from home one day each week: Employee A who shows up 5 minutes early every morning, and is eager to work on any project or employee B who shows up 5 minutes late and always complains about additional responsibilities?

To your boss, the idea of you working from home means that they lose the ability to directly manage you. They can’t just come look over your shoulder and see what you are up to. You need to position yourself so your boss will feel like you are going to do just as good of work without them around to watch you

Here are some ideas of ways to position yourself as someone they don’t have to directly manage:

1. Get to Work at Least 5 minutes Earlier than Your Boss — This assumes that your boss gets to work before normal starting time. If you boss usually comes in late, then get to work 5 minutes before normal starting time. Your boss needs to assume that when they come in you will already be busy working. This shows your boss that working from home isn’t going to mean groggily stumbling to your computer at 9am and taking the next 45 minutes to actually wake up and get to work. It also helps establish that you don’t have to be watched in order to be productive.
2. Voluntarily Take On Additional Responsibilities — This can be tricky. Make sure you only take on responsibilities that you could continue to do from home. You don’t want to work yourself into a position where you have to physically be at work. The ideal responsibility is something that your boss will notice and that only lasts for a short period of time. Remember, you are trying to help your boss feel comfortable with not managing you directly. Assuming that you really can work without close supervision, you are just trying to tweak your bosses perception of you to be favorable to your proposal.
3. Keep Your Boss Updated — Make sure you keep your boss updated with status emails or brief meetings. Your boss shouldn’t have to come to you to find out how things are going. Be proactive and make sure you give them all the information they need. Some bosses will be worried that if you work at home, they will lose touch with what is going on. If you send them a weekly summary email (or what ever frequency works best), they are less likely to worry about this than if they are constantly having to track you down to ask you how things are going.
4. Your Boss Should Never See You Goofing Off — While it might be perfectly acceptable to spend a few minutes reading news websites or checking personal email, don’t do it. At least don’t let your boss see you doing it–even if they are fine with it. When you bring up the subject of working from home, your bosses brain is going to quickly scour all memories to see if there are any reasons you shouldn’t be allowed to work from home. If it comes back with a bunch of memories of you closing your GMail account or shutting a CNN window, it will be much more difficult to get them to look at your proposal.
5. Do Let Your Boss See You Working — This is kind of related to keeping your boss updated, but you need to make sure your extra efforts are visible. For example, if you are working a few hours each evening from home, you may want to occasionally email your boss late at night. If they get use to seeing you email them work questions at 10pm a few nights each week it will help you stand out as someone who is going the extra mile.
6. Try Not to Ask For Too Many Favors — At least not right before suggesting that you be allowed to work from home. Some bosses try to keep a mental score card in order to be fair to all their employees. If you have asked for a bunch of other favors (leaving early, etc.) it might make them automatically be inclined to say no.

3. Determine the Business Reason You Should Be Allowed to Work From Home

This is where I see most people fail. Here are some of the things employees are likely to say and what their boss is going to actually hear:

• I’ll be able to spend more time with my kids. Boss hears: I’ll spend half of my time babysitting instead of working. Clients will hear screaming babies in the back ground when they call me.
• I won’t have to deal with the long commute and traffic. Boss hears: I’ll spend my first 45 minutes of work waking up and eating breakfast. I’m looking forward to working all day in my pajamas.

Notice that each of these items focus on the advantages for the employee. No matter how nice, your boss doesn’t really care if working from home would be convenient for you. You are working for money–not for your convenience. If you want your boss to get on board, you need to address issues that your boss is actually concerned about. Here are a couple things that might concern your boss:

1. Lack of offices and cubicles for new hires.
2. Increasing employee productivity.
3. Attracting and retaining valuable employees.
4. Increasing billable hours.
5. Being environmentally friendly.
6. Expense of employee parking.

Show your boss how working from home will actually benefit the business. Leave out or minimize personal benefits. If you spend too much time talking about how it will benefit you personally, your boss will assume you are being over optimistic about the work benefits.

Unless you are very very valuable, saying that you will quit if not allowed to work from home, is probably a poor strategy. However, if your boss knows you are looking for a position with a shorter commute and you are a valuable employee, you may be able to mention that you’d rather stay with the company if you could eliminate one or two days of your commute each week.

4. Prepare your Proposal

Now that you have a good idea of why it will benefit the business to let you work from home, you need to prepare a proposal for your boss. You don’t necessarily need a formal 50 page report, but having some points typed up, will let your boss feel more comfortable in saying yes.

If you want to make it easy for your boss to say yes, make your proposal as risk free as possible. If you boss looks at the proposal and thinks “This might work, but if it doesn’t I’m going to have a major mess on my hands” it will get shot down. The status quo is perceived as being safe, so make sure your boss sees in your proposal a way to get back to status quo as quickly as possible if things don’t work out.

Here are some points to consider for your proposal:

1. Start out by suggesting a trial period of one day per week for 5 or 6 weeks.
2. Choose the one day you’ll be working from home carefully to avoid being absent for important face to face meetings.
3. Try not to choose a Monday or Friday to work from home. It will make it seem too much like a three day weekend.
4. Give your boss a safety net and a way to pull the plug if things don’t work out.
5. Make sure you focus on the business benefits and minimize personal benefits.
6. Have some statics to backup your proposal. (Examples from other companies, cost savings, environmental benefits, etc.).
7. State what you will give up to be able to work from home. Maybe giving up your office, paid parking space, company desktop computer, etc.
8. Don’t try to force an immediate answer. Give your boss some time to think about it.

5. A Successful Trial Period

Once your boss says yes to a trial, you aren’t free and clear. In fact, if you are working from home, you need to constantly vigilant to manage people’s perception. If people start feeling like you aren’t pulling your share of the load, you may be the first person to go, if they need to downsize.

Here are some tips for the trial period and for working from home in general:

• Control Background Noise — If a coworkers calls and hears a lot of home type background noise (TV, Kids, dogs barking, etc), it is going to lose you credibility. People talking to you on the phone should not be able to tell you are at home.
• Be Available — Avoid letting phone calls go to voice mail (especially during the trial). Your boss and coworkers need to feel like they can get ahold of you just as easily at home as when you were physically on location.
• Start Your Day Early — If you have emails to answer, getting replies sent as your co-workers are driving to work is a good practice. If they regularly get to the office only to find you’ve already been working for 30 minutes, it will be difficult to complain that you aren’t pulling your weight. One trick to doing this is to spend 15 to 30 minutes answering emails before eating breakfast. So if most people get to work at 9am, you could spend 15 minutes answering emails at 8am, eat breakfast at 8:15, and be ready to work at 8:45.
• Don’t Flaunt the Fact You Work at Home — You may have co-workers who your boss doesn’t feel are self motivated enough to work from home. Don’t keep mentioning the fact that you are at home to them. You could end up causing a mess that would get you recalled back to the office. If you have shared calendars, don’t mark that you are “at home” simply say “off site” or “working remotely” to help minimize any hard feelings.
• Communicate with Your Boss — Make sure you keep tabs on how things are working out for your boss and offer to tweak things to make things go smoother. If your boss mentions a new meeting on the day you are at home, offer to change your schedule so you can come to the meeting. On a consistent basis, ask your boss if things are working out ok and if there is anything you need to know about or improve.

Summary

Working at home isn’t for everyone, but it can be a way to reclaim valuable time normally lost to commuting. Before approaching your boss about working from home, try to work out all the technical details and think about how to make it attractive from your boss’s perspective. By following the five steps above, you’ll drastically increase the chances of coming up with a workable solution that your boss will actually approve.

Reading is an incredibly important skill to have. Just about any form of education will involve reading, sometimes almost exclusively. You can often make yourself an expert on an intellectual subject just by reading enough in that area. But despite the incredible importance of reading, most people are wildly inefficient at it. Like a child that never goes beyond a crawl, most people have enough reading skills to move around, but they are far from running.

Over a year ago I picked up the book, Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump, an expert in the area of speed-reading. From that purchase I took the time and energy to study other ways to improve my reading skill. I recently got a chance to finish Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now, and I read the last half of the book in under forty minutes.

When I did the initial test at the start of the book, I could read at 450 words per minute. A little above the average of around 300, but nothing spectacular. By using the techniques I’ll describe in this article I was able to increase that rate to around 900 words per minute in average situations, at least doubling of my reading rate.

I believe there are six major keys to improving your reading skill. Like all skills, success only comes through practice, so just reading this article won’t be enough. But if you are interested in how you might be able to make dramatic improvements in both speed and comprehension, I’ve found these six points to be the best start.

1) Remember, Reading is Not Linear

How do you read a book? Likely from start to finish, never going back and never skipping any sections. This is probably one of the most inefficient ways to read. The beauty of text is that it is non-linear. You can skip down to read only my main bullet points, or read them in practically any order. Although the pattern of start to finish might be a simple one, it isn’t always the most effective.

For most books I do read in a roughly start to finish fashion. But I frequently re-read passages that I want to get a greater understanding of and completely skim over passages that I feel are redundant or unnecessary. Good writers generally add anecdotes or metaphors to improve understanding of a concept which you can skim over top of if you already get their point. Similarly, bad writers often go short on explanation of complex details so re-reading can allow your brain the time to form the concepts.

Not only is reading non-linear but it doesn’t have a set pace. Although I read some books at about 900 words per minute, I slow down to 200 if the passage I am reading is particularly information dense or complicated. Similarly I can skim at over 1500 words per minute if I’m reading mostly fluff. Saying I can read at 900 wpm is like saying I can drive at 100 km/h. Speed reading isn’t just about faster but pacing yourself for the specific reading task you face.

Most people read a book as if it were given to them as a speech. They listen to the author and follow along with what he is saying in a purely sequential manner. In order to reach faster rates of comprehension you have to learn to abandon this tactic. You can start this by not subvocalizing.

2) Stop Subvocalizing

When you started to read you probably read out loud. Your elementary school teacher wanted you to read the book and say the words aloud. After you mastered this skill, you were told to simply say the words inside your head and read quietly. This is where most reading education and skill levels end.

To move to a new level you need to stop sounding the words inside your head or subvocalizing. Subvocalizing takes time, more time than is necessary to comprehend the words you are reading. It is almost impossible to go much beyond 400 or 500 words while subvocalizing. Instead you need to train yourself to read without hearing the words in your head.

But for most people this has become such an ingrained reading habit that they don’t realize that subvocalization is a distinct process to comprehension. If I read at around a thousand words per minute, there is no way I could hear the words in my head while trying to process them. Instead I simply see the word and my brain automatically constructs what has been written. I’ll understand a line of text that I looked over in a second, even though it may have taken at least five just to say the words in my head.

Since most people currently can’t separate the subvocalization from comprehension, they are locked in at a rate of about 400-500 words. Moving beyond that rate requires that you practice reading faster than you can actually read.

First, you can only stop subvocalizing by doing practice reading. Trying to stop now is just going to result in blurred skimming of the material which really isn’t the point. Some of the people after hearing my suggestion tried to stop subvocalizing and missed the rest of the article. Focus on reading when you read, focus on improving speed reading when you practice — you can’t do both at the same time!

The next point is that subvocalization simply means reading every word inside your head. Many people who already read at a high rate (>400 words) already lapse out of subvocalization without realizing it. Once you stop and realize to yourself, “whoops! I’m subvocalizing, better stop…” you’ve already lost your focus and the ability to speed read is gone. Reading is all about focus and internal distractions by trying to speed read instead of just reading will screw you up. You should only focus on speed reading during practice sessions where you attempt to practice new techniques and read faster than you can comprehend.

How do you know when you stop subvocalizing. One person in the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading mentioned that she found the key to speed reading. She said to her instructor, “You just have to read only the important words.” The instructor replied, “But how do you know which words are important?” She had actually be interpreting the sentences but she had stop subvocalizing most of the words.

Similarly when you use advanced techniques that involve reading several lines at once or reading words backwards, you may still “hear” the words inside your head as you understand the sentences but when you look at how fast you are actually reading it along with the mechanics of reading, true subvocalization is impossible.

If you continue to hear the words you are reading inside your head, don’t worry about it, that is likely an illusion once you get up to 700-800 words per minute. It would be impossible to actually read every word in your head so the sounds you hear when reading are likely just your brain assembling the information. Subvocalization means hearing every… single… word… sounded out. Considering I have some very astute and skilled readers here you probably already lapse in and out of subvocalization without realizing it.

Subvocalization can be useful. Just like it isn’t always wise to read fast, sometimes it makes sense to subvocalize. My article focused on how to read faster, but sometimes you need to read slower. Better reading comes from having a brake and a gas pedal not just one or the other. If you are having trouble comprehending, slowing down so you start subvocalizing again can eliminate distractions and refocus your mind on the material.

3) Practice Reading

Practice reading doesn’t mean reading. Practice reading involves reading faster than you can actually read. Chances are you won’t comprehend much of what you are reading because your brain is so used to going at a slower rate and subvocalizing. The point is simply to see the text faster than you can read so you can untie the habit of sounding the words as you comprehend them.

You can start doing this by taking out a timer or a stop watch and simply viewing as much text in a book as possible in one minute. Use a book you haven’t read before to ensure your brain is actually practicing instead of relying on memory. Mark out where you started and stopped. Count the number of words per line (use a quick average) and then the number of lines you actually read in the book to compute your practice reading rate.

Once you get used to practice reading at a high rate that you can’t comprehend, you should slowly be able to actually comprehend at a slightly slower rate but still faster than if you subvocalized. I would often practice read at between 1500 and 1800 words per minute, and although I lacked comprehension skill, I could maintain it at about 900-1000, over double what I had done when I subvocalized.

But how can you practice read faster than you can read? How do you follow the text but still go faster than you can read? The answer is another of speed reading tricks, using a pointer.

4) Use a Pointer

Your eyes don’t stay fixed in one spot when reading. Eye tracking movements have shown that your eyes actually quiver and move around considerably. And every movement away from your position in text requires a few milliseconds to readjust. These little readjustments in locating your place in a book add up to be very costly if you want to go faster.

Use your index finger to mark where you are on the page at all times. It should follow along with the word you are currently reading, slowly scrolling across each line and then back down one. It may feel awkward at first and it may even temporarily slow your reading rate as you adjust, but using a pointer is critical if you want to improve your reading skill.

Using a pointer is also crucial if you want to practice read. By moving your finger faster than you can actually read, your eyes get used to viewing text faster than your brain can process what is written down. This will break your subvocalization attachment and can easily let you double your reading rate with sufficient practice.

You should use your finger as a pointer all the time. When I first started with the habit I found it annoying to hold the book in a funny position so I could use my right hand to scroll the page. I thought it was silly and maybe even a waste of time. But now I find it hard to read without a pointer. Noticing how much it has helped me focus my reading efforts it is a priceless tool in reading.

A Side Note on Pointers

I mentioned that it is important to use a pointer to reduce eye movements and focus your reading. The book Breakthrough Rapid Reading promotes using your finger to read everything, even subtitles on a movie screen! I’ve found that this is impractical.

I talk about speed reading where it applies most, long books. Short website articles I frequently slow down on because I don’t have the time to get fully engaged and burn through it. If I am reading something like an e-book, sometimes I will use my mouse cursor to focus my eyes, but this requires a little more dexterity than your hand.

I believe it is important when you start out speed reading to always use some form of a pointer. This will make it a habit. After the habit is installed, you may decide certain mediums of writing just aren’t worth using your speed reading habits on. Just as you wouldn’t accelerate to 100 mph to go buy groceries around the corner, certain reading tasks don’t get much benefit from speed reading.

5) Eliminate Distractions

As a university student living on campus I’ve noticed a few of my friends who “study” while watching television. Not surprisingly, these tend to be the same people who complain about how much studying they have to do. Reading can’t happen in an environment where external distractions are overwhelming.

If you need a break, take a break. Taking a few minutes to watch a television show, listen to some music or just close your eyes can often improve your focus. But don’t multitask with your reading or you’ll lose any benefits speed reading can offer. Worse, because you have stopped subvocalizing, you might even skim through several pages before you realize you haven’t comprehended anything that was written.

Distractions will hamper regular reading but they will make speed reading impossible. Subvocalization creates enough mental noise that it can hold your attention, but without that it can often be difficult to stick with what you are reading.

External distractions may be a problem, but internal distractions are just as bad. They occur when in the midst of reading you start pondering that conversation you just had with a friend, the movie you want to see or whether you should do your laundry. The way to remove internal distractions comes from clearly identifying a purpose and a motivation.

6) Find Your Motivation

If there was one piece of advice I would offer to improve your reading rate it would be simply to engross yourself in the material you are studying. If you can connect what you are reading to a deeply held motivation, and determine your specific purpose for reading you can maintain a very alert and focused state.

Most people don’t do this. Instead they force themselves to study the book they know they should and end up having to refocus themselves every thirty seconds when their mind decides that this book is boring and would like to be somewhere else.

First, find a general motivation. This is how what you are reading relates to your truly motivating goals and passions in life. When I read my psychology textbook I focus on the fact that many personal development principles come from an understanding of human psychology and that I may discover new ideas if I look carefully. When studying ancient Asian history I focused on the fact that studying a completely different culture could offer insights into how Western and Eastern value systems differed, giving me new thoughts on whether my values are as absolute as I once thought. I also focused on the fact that many great philosophers such as Buddha and Confucius lived during these times with a profound influence on the ideas of these nations.

The general motivation should make you want to read the book. If you don’t genuinely want to read the book, come up with more reasons it is attached to your deepest interests or it is going to be a struggle to move through. You can find a general motivation for reading any book if you are creative enough, so don’t tell me you can’t figure out one.

The second portion is to determine your specific motivation for reading. What are you specifically looking for when reading the book. New ideas? A practical solution to a problem? An understanding of a concept? A chance to flex your mental muscles? Figure out what you want to get out of each reading session so your mind is primed to intake that knowledge.

If you are interested in improving your speed reading, I strongly suggest Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump. The book goes from beginner concepts that I’ve detailed to even more advanced ones that I have yet to master (such as reading several lines at once and reading sentences backwards to save time on a pointer backstroke). Speed reading is definitely a worthwhile skill and at the very least your friends will be impressed.

Introduction to Detecting Lies:

The following techniques to telling if someone is lying are often used by police, and security experts. This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other deceptions.

Warning: Sometimes Ignorance is bliss; after gaining this knowledge, you may be hurt when it is obvious that someone is lying to you.


Signs of Deception:

Body Language of Lies:

• Physical expression will be limited and stiff, with few arm and hand movements. Hand, arm and leg movement are toward their own body the liar takes up less space.

• A person who is lying to you will avoid making eye contact.

• Hands touching their face, throat & mouth. Touching or scratching the nose or behind their ear. Not likely to touch his chest/heart with an open hand.

Emotional Gestures & Contradiction

• Timing and duration of emotional gestures and emotions are off a normal pace. The display of emotion is delayed, stays longer it would naturally, then stops suddenly.

• Timing is off between emotions gestures/expressions and words. Example: Someone says “I love it!” when receiving a gift, and then smile after making that statement, rather then at the same time the statement is made.

• Gestures/expressions don’t match the verbal statement, such as frowning when saying “I love you.”

• Expressions are limited to mouth movements when someone is faking emotions (like happy, surprised, sad, awe, )instead of the whole face. For example; when someone smiles naturally their whole face is involved: jaw/cheek movement, eyes and forehead push down, etc.

Interactions and Reactions

• A guilty person gets defensive. An innocent person will often go on the offensive.

• A liar is uncomfortable facing his questioner/accuser and may turn his head or body away.

• A liar might unconsciously place objects (book, coffee cup, etc.) between themselves and you.

Verbal Context and Content

• A liar will use your words to make answer a question. When asked, “Did you eat the last cookie?” The liar answers, “No, I did not eat the last cookie.”

•A statement with a contraction is more likely to be truthful: “ I didn’t do it” instead of “I did not do it”

• Liars sometimes avoid “lying” by not making direct statements. They imply answers instead of denying something directly.

• The guilty person may speak more than natural, adding unnecessary details to convince you… they are not comfortable with silence or pauses in the conversation.

• A liar may leave out pronouns and speak in a monotonous tone. When a truthful statement is made the pronoun is emphasized as much or more than the rest of the words in a statement.

• Words may be garbled and spoken softly, and syntax and grammar may be off. In other words, his sentences will likely be muddled rather than emphasized.

Other signs of a lie:

• If you believe someone is lying, then change subject of a conversation quickly, a liar follows along willingly and becomes more relaxed. The guilty wants the subject changed; an innocent person may be confused by the sudden change in topics and will want to back to the previous subject.

• Using humor or sarcasm to avoid a subject.

Final Notes:

Obviously, just because someone exhibits one or more of these signs does not make them a liar. The above behaviors should be compared to a persons base (normal) behavior whenever possible.

Eye Movement and Direction and How it Can Reveal the Truth or a Lie

This is a continuation of How to Detect Lies. Many of the comments by our visitors have asked about how eye direction can indicate the presence of a lie.

So can the direction a person’s eyes are looking reveal whether or not they are making a truthful statement? Short answer: sort of. But, it isn’t as simple as some recent television shows or movies make it seem. In these shows a detective will deduce a person is being untruthful simply because they looked to the left or right while making a statement.

In reality, it would be foolish to make such a snap judgement without further investigation… but the technique does have some merit. So, here it is… read, ponder and test it on your friends and family to see how reliable it is for yourself.

Visual Accessing Cues

The first time “Visual Accessing Cues” were discussed (at least to my knowledge), was by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in their book “Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) ” From their own experiments this is what they found:

When asked a question a “normally organized” right-handed person looks (from your viewpoint, looking at them):

Up and to the Left
Indicates: Visually Constructed Images (Vc)
If you asked someone to “Imagine a purple buffalo”, this would be the direction their eyes moved in while thinking about the question as they “Visually Constructed” a purple buffalo in their mind.

Up and to the Right
Indicates: Visually Remembered Images (Vr)
If you asked someone to “What color was the first house you lived in?”, this would be the direction their eyes moved in while thinking about the question as they “Visually Remembered” the color of their childhood home.

To the Left
Indicates: Auditory Constructed (Ac)
If you asked someone to “Try and create the highest the sound of the pitch possible in your head”, this would be the direction their eyes moved in while thinking about the question as they “Auditorily Constructed” this this sound that they have never heard of.

To the Right
Indicates: Auditory Remembered (Ar)
If you asked someone to “Remember what their mother’s voice sounds like “, this would be the direction their eyes moved in while thinking about the question as they “Auditorily Remembered ” this sound.

Down and to the Left
Indicates: Feeling / Kinesthetic (F)
If you asked someone to “Can you remember the smell of a camp fire? “, this would be the direction their eyes moved in while thinking about the question as they used recalled a smell, feeling, or taste.

Down and To the Right
Indicates: Internal Dialog (Ai)
This is the direction of someone eyes as they “talk to themselves”.

The Gist of it…

How this information is used to detect lies:

Example: Let’s say your child ask’s you for a cookie, and you ask them “well, what did your mother say?” As they reply “Mom said… yes.” they look to the left. This would indicate a made up answer as their eyes are showing a “constructed image or sound. Looking to the right would indicated a “remembered” voice or image, and thus would be telling the truth.

Final Notes:

*** Looking straight ahead or with eyes that are defocused/unmoving is also considered a sign of visual accessing.

*** A typical left-handed person would have the opposite meanings for their eye-directions.

*** As with other signs of lying, you should first establish and understand a persons base-behavior before concluding they are lying by the direction of their eyes.

*** Many critics believe the above is a bunch of bull***t. In my own experiments I have found these techniques to be more true than not. But, why not find out for yourself? Make up a list of questions that like the sample ones, and give them to your friends/family anyone who would be your guinea pig, observe their eye movements and record the results.