Nir Eyal argues for speed listening instead of speed reading: save articles to Pocket and have apps like Lizgo or Voice Dream read them aloud. He claims listening at 550 words per minute beats reading at 200-300 wpm, and pairs it with activities like walking or the gym to cut distractions.
Hi, I'm Nir Eyal, author of how to Build Habit Forming Products. And today I'm going to give you one of my favorite productivity tips. So if you're anything like me, you love consuming great content online. There's so much to read, so many great bloggers out there. But like me, you probably have a shortage in time to read all that content. So I'm going to let you in on a technique I use that has three big benefits. I'm sure you've heard about speed reading. This is not speed reading. That does not work. I'm going to let you in on a technique I call speed listening. Speed listening has three big benefits. Here they are. Number one, speed listening keeps you from overusing the Internet, from scrolling and scrolling from article to article to article. Number two, speed listening helps you do things you want to do, like going to the gym or taking a walk outside using a technique called temptation bundling. And finally, number three, speed listening helps you consume content faster than reading it. And here's why. So before I let you in on all this, let me tell you what speed listening is. Here's how speed listening actually works. So let's say you're online. You see an article you'd like to read. The first step is not to read the article online. Whatever you do, don't read the article there online. Instead, what you want to do is to save that article using this chrome extension to an app called Pocket. Pocket will then put those articles inside a feed that you can get to later and it will scrub out all the ads and just leave the text of the article. So this is how using this technique saves you time online and makes sure that you don't fall down. This time wasting vortex of going article to article to article online. The articles are all still there. You'll just get to them later. Now here's where the second big benefit of this technique comes to play. It uses a tactic called temptation bundling. Here's how it works. Temptation bundling is when we combine the reward of something that we really want to do with a behavior that we kind of don't want to do. Temptation bundling has been proven effective in several studies now. And so I use the reward of reading those Pocket articles to get me to go to the gym. But you're thinking, yeah, but how do you read articles when you're in the gym? Here's where it gets interesting. You see, you can use other apps. This one's called Lizgo. And there's another one called Voice Dream that will actually Pull from your pocket cue and read to you.
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So as you can hear, the technology is actually pretty good in reading out those articles. And I know a lot of people like to listen to podcasts when they're driving or at the gym. But let me just say a few things about podcasting. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of some podcasts, but I really think that there's no substitute to the clarity of someone who's taken the time to write an article. I also think that sometimes podcasting doesn't provide the audience that a blog post on medium or to a blog can give someone who just wants to write a few insights. I'm a bit biased here because I use writing as my primary communication medium, but if you're not subscribing to some thought leaders in the space, and if you're not reading articles on medium, you really are missing out on some great stuff. I also think that reading or listening to something that has been written can teach you actually to become a better writer and communicator yourself. And that's something you don't get from a freeform podcast. Now the one added benefit to listening to articles is that you can actually process them faster than reading them. It's kind of counterintuitive. Here's why. So when I listen to an article through these apps, I can actually listen at 550 words per minute. That's way faster than the 200 to 300 words a minute that the average person reads. I happen to be a particularly slow reader, so having these articles read to me is incredibly helpful. Another added benefit of using an app like Pocket is that you can actually start getting recommendations from other people and start following their reading lists here. I've got 92,000 followers, so I hope I've given you some food for thought on how you can read more content by listening to it through this speed listening technique. So the three big benefits again of this speed listening technique are that you can have less distraction online, you can use temptation bundling, and you can read faster by listening to the content. Thanks for watching. And if you have any questions on personal habits, habit forming technology, send them my way through Facebook, through Twitter, through Snapchat, or you can always find me@nearandfar.com Thanks.
