PXReader – Learn to Speedread in Less Than 15 Minutes!
If just hearing the term ‘information overload’ makes you break into a cold sweat, you’re not alone. Whether it’s coming at you in the form of the latest innovations, policies and reports affecting the work you do, or the insane courseload you have to get through, or the breaking news coming at you through your socials feeds… we’re up against it!
And sure, we’ve now got more AI chatbots than we know to what to do with... but we’ve all seen some of the less-than-ideal results that come with overrelying on their output...
So where does that leave us? What can we hope to do, if anything, to level up our own info processing systems and tools?
…Enter speedreading!
Learn for Free…
With the PXReader web app, it will only take you 15 minutes to:
Check your baseline reading speed…
…work through the targeted, scientifically developed PX Method drills…
…and find out whether they’ve had any effect on your reading…
…all free of charge!
Learn on Any Device…
The PXReader app has been developed using responsive design principles, which means you can access and work through the PX drills in the comfort of your own home... and while on planes, trains, and automobiles (so long as you’re not driving)!
Plus: As PXReader is a web app, there’s no need for any pesky downloads! Click this link to try it RIGHT NOW!
…and Learn Because the World Needs You at Your Best!
Speedreading was first made popular in the late 1950s by US schoolteacher Evelyn Wood, and it took the country by storm for several decades afterwards.
So people obviously felt there was a desperate need to pick up this skill... as early as the 1950s. Fast-forward to today’s world of ramped-up innovation, non-stop knowledge creation, and minute-by-minute news updates, and that sentiment has never rung truer.
Here's a photo of former US President Jimmy Carter learning with his daughter!
Even as we’re increasingly being asked to work with AI, it’s still more like being given a junior staffer to supervise, rather than a true and equal colleague. It still falls on you to possess the skill needed, and to process enough information, to know what to delegate to your ‘employee’, and to determine what needs correcting.
But guess what? As of 2019, most people’s reading speed lies somewhere between 200-300 words a minute. For size, that’s roughly the length of a standard pocketbook page! Only 1% (just) of people read at 400+ words per minute.
THIS SIMPLY WON’T DO.
Luckily, with the PXReader web app, it only takes 15 minutes to unlock your own potential. To rise to whatever challenge comes your way. To become your most high-achieving self. To finally get through that list of books you’ve been meaning to read.
So Why Should I Trust the PX Method?
…No, honestly? On the face of it, the PXReader web app does nothing but force you to track a blue line down a page of text at unreasonably high speeds for several stressful minutes at a time. How’s this not hokum, smoke and mirrors, snake oil?
Well… it was developed by Tim Ferriss – yes, the Tim Ferriss – in partnership with Harvard University – yes, the… you get it.
The aim of this partnership was to come up with a series of eye movement exercises that would target reading inefficiencies and increase speed as a result. The bad guys that were identified are as follows:
1. Eye saccades
So this is how your eyes move (yes, YOURS too) when you scan any horizon or environment.
Why, you might ask?
Well, from an evolutionary perspective, it’s a great feature for, say, taking in a novel environment and making out who’s friend vs. foe, or what’s threat vs. opportunity – buuut it’s not so useful in the coffee-with-book-in-hand setting.
2. Conscious and subconscious rereading
You know when you’ve hit a wall while reading, or just let your mind drift, and suddenly you’ve read a single sentence half a dozen times? That's conscious rereading. Subconscious rereading, on the other hand, actually results from those eye jerks we covered earlier, but in the up-down direction!
3. Narrow visual focus
When reading, most readers deliberately look at each word one-by-one, from end to end of each sentence. In doing so, we fail to engage our peripheral vision.
Bad guys #1 and #2 are targeted by PXReader's trackers-and-pacers drills – by forcing the eye to move in a single direction at speeds of up to 1,500 words per minute (mind-blown emoji), the eyes are simply not given the chance to be inefficient.
Bad guy #3 is targeted with what’s called perceptual expansion exercises (available on PC and tablet only) – here, you're basically learning to trust that your peripheral vision is capable of picking up the words near page margins (and it can, promise!).
Help Make #speedreadingforall Happen…
The original PX Method was designed to be a pen-and-paper exercise: you need a magazine (or a physical book so long as it can lie flat on a table). You need pen and ruler to scan pages, and to prepare 20-odd pages for three levels of perceptual expansion drills. You need a timer – you may even need a metronome to make sure you’re scanning pages at the right speed…
…and if the thought of having to juggle all those pieces yourself made you break out in a cold sweat again, then you get why the PXReader app was created!
PXReader is all about getting you ALL the cognitive benefits of the PX Method, without ANY of the stress of being your own examiner!
About PXREader
Making the PX Method freely available to all has been a labour of love. Over the past year, PXReader has morphed into an increasingly easy-to-use web app with a wider array of texts to learn with (shoutout to Project Gutenberg for making literary classics available to all!).
And we’re not stopping here!
Moving forward, we want to achieve the following within the next six months:
Make it possible for you to set your own reading rates and exercise session lengths so you can push yourself to your own limits and make your training session work for you.
Make PXReader available in more languages.
Continue expanding the range of practice texts at your disposal.
To find out more, please email [email protected] and follow @PXReader on X, Instagram and Facebook.
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