Work A Shorter Day With The Three Basic Speed Skills

Work a shorter day by employing three basic speed skills to get more work done in less time.

You can get more work done in less time by accelerating your speed in accomplishing important tasks. Three fundamental speed skills offer the key to shortening your work day:

• Speed reading
• Fast writing
• Effective listening

Strategic, purposeful reading accomplishes your goal faster. Most people just plod through their reading from beginning to end. By the time they get to the end of reading, they've forgotten the material at the beginning! Sound too familiar to you? Instead, follow these key principles:

• Plan to go over the material 2-4 times
• Use your hand or finger to pace yourself as you read
• On your first pass, do a fast scan of the material, no more than 5-10 seconds per page
• Take a few moments to jot down some questions about the material that you'd like to have answered
• On your next reading, slow down and use notes and highlighting to capture the answers you're looking for

"Writing with a purpose" speeds every writing task. We all often just plunge into writing, whether it’s a short email or a long paper. As we painfully write sentence after sentence, after a while we start getting bogged down, and everything we've written so far seems to actually slow us down, as if we were wading through hip-deep mud. Speed writing can fix this!

Speed writing begins, ironically, not by writing, but by pausing and visioning what the end is that you want to accomplish with your writing. Are you just trying to convey two facts in your writing, or are you trying to convince your audience of a complex proposition? Knowing your goal helps you structure your writing. Always put your notes in the order that you expect them to appear in your writing. Always draft an outline of the major points you expect to make. Unless you need more, automatically use the basic three-part structure of:

1. Introduction
2. Body
3. Conclusion

It's surprising as how often this works, even for basic transactional emails.

You can further speed your writing by keeping you sentences short. You will write faster because this helps keep you 'on track' for conveying the key points from your outline. Your audience will also be able to read your message faster! Finally, be sure to do an editing pass and then a final proof reading of your writing. If your writing does not accomplish its goal the first time around, you'll have to spend more time on the task.

Use effective listening to speed your day. There are four major areas where poor listening might cost you time that you can't afford in your hectic day. These listening "time wasters" are:

1. Poor listening habits such as talking more than you listen or not focusing on what the other person is saying.
2. Failing to ask the right, concise questions to draw your speaker quickly to what you need to know
3. Letting classic communication roadblocks get in your way such as you slipping into the mode of telling the other person, rather than truly listening to them. Examples would be you switching into a mode of ordering, advising, moralizing warning, or arguing with the other person. These might feel good in the moment, but they slow you in your objective of learning desired information from the other person. Put your ego to the side, and only speak if you need to ask a clarifying or guiding question.
4. Letting communication break down through not really hearing what the speaker is saying. As Abraham Lincoln said, "I spend one third of my preparation in preparing for what I am going to say, and two thirds of my preparation in anticipating what the other person will say to me."

A great way to be sure that you've heard correctly, is to restate what the speaker wants you to understand. When you think they're done speaking, simply say "What I understand from what you said is..." and then rephrase the key points that you need to know.

There is no magic way to getting more work done in less time. It's really about simple efficiency based in staying task-focused and goal-oriented. Whether your goal is learning information from reading, achieving a goal through the written word, or absorbing information from another speaker, keep your goal in mind and use these purposeful techniques to get the task done more quickly.