PowerReading — How to read 11 books in 4 days

Read books in 1 hour to extract maximum knowledge. Read faster, learn more, change your life. No speed reading.

Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash

Beginning of 2018 I set myself the goal to read 50 books during the year. One book each week with a small buffer should be feasible — that’s what I thought. It came how you can imagine: 4 days before the New Year’s Eve, I discovered with ‘surprise’ that my book count was just about 39 books, meaning 11 to go within 4 days. As my previous reading techniques had failed, I needed to change something quickly. I needed a methodology to get more knowledge from books in less time. I needed to change the way how to read books. PowerReading was born.

Why read books

In times where university degrees become outdated in 5 years and technology progresses faster than ever before, reading books is the key driver of learning and advancing in life.

World’s most successful people are passionate readers: Warren Buffet reads 500 pages a day, Bill Gates about 50 books each year and Elon Musk taught himself to build rockets by reading.

Books expand your knowledge, shift your mindset and allow you to learn from world-leaders without leaving your home.

Speedreading fails to turn books into applicable knowledge

Speed reading has gained immense popularity as it enables people to increase their reading speed and thereby increase the number of books read if time investment stays constant.

Speed reading certainly offers many advantages and it is certainly possible to double your reading speed but…

1. it takes a lot of training to reach a solid level
2. it fails to solve the real problem: getting the right knowledge out of a book (efficiency vs. effectiveness)

We do not read books for the sole purpose of reading books but to extract useful information for the application to our real-world problems.

If an average book needs about 8 hours to be completed, speed reading can bring you to 4 hours in best-case but will probably lead to some loss of knowledge.

With only 4 days left, learning the speed reading technique was not feasible and therefore not an option. I needed a better and faster technique — without sacrificing the main purpose: to learn.

PowerReading enables you to read any book within 1 hour and maximizes the applicable knowledge extraction

To achieve my goal, I combined existing principles from books I have already read like Deep Work, Essentialism, The One Thing for the purpose of maximizing actionable knowledge while keeping the time investment to a minimum.

You will get to know the underlying principles and the process of PowerReading to use and adapt it to your own needs.

Principles

PowerReading enables you to read any book in less time through one focused session and a less-is-more approach. All books contain only a handful of vital ideas in the structure of 1) hypothesis 2) reasons 3) examples. Only the hypothesis is essential, the explanation and examples are not. Details and concepts which we do not consider as important will be forgotten. There is no point in spending energy on learning these in first-hand.

1. Read for action. Know your intentions before starting to read. Being aware of what you want to take out of a book helps to separate important from unimportant content.
2. Understand the big picture first. A book is like a mosaic: if you do not know how it will look like in the end, working with details will be a pain. Move from high to low hierarchy.
3. Know the structure and focus on the essential ideas. Each book contains only 1–3 key concepts but each is followed by a lengthy explanation and several examples. As you read a book to gain actionable knowledge, any explanations and repetitive examples will not help you achieve this and therefore should be ignored. 80/20 Pareto Rule also applies in books: 20% of the pages contain 80% of the relevant content.
4. Scan, Skip, Read. Skip pages of redundant or uninteresting content. Do not read linearly from start to end including every detail. It simply does not make sense to read every paragraph, page or chapter — focus on identifying and understanding the relevant 20%. Once you have understood the core concept, dealing with more does not add further value.
5. Work with the books. Don’t see a book as the holy grail but rather as a tool to achieve your goal. Tools need to be used and you can use a book best my underlining key concepts, marking important paragraphs and taking notes on the side. If you still can sell it after reading, you have not used it enough.
6. Set a one-hour time limit to read more productively. Parkinson law says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. In simple words: The less time we have to read a book, the more effective we will it do.
7. Read to teach. Take notes in a way that you could immediately present your findings to your friends afterwards. It also helps you once you go over the book again in a later stage of your life. Just flick through the pages, go through the marked parts and refresh your knowledge. Everything is done in only 10 minutes.

Read with an objective, focus on the essential content and debrief afterwards

Preparation

1. Get ready for peak performance. Having a single hour to read a book is extremely intensive. Have a coffee or some fruits and do some breathing exercises before-hand. You need a clear focus and the willingness to go through pain.
2. Set yourself in a distraction-free environment. Go to a calm room and make sure nobody can disturb you. Sit at a desk and not your couch to trigger your brain for work. Set your phone into aeroplane mode and put it away. Close all unnecessary browser tabs (if you are using a computer to take notes) and turn the do-not-disturb mode on.
3. Set an hour time limit and immediately stop when the alarm rings. Do not read further. If you still keep going, you will tell your brain that is okay to break rules and instead 3 minutes you will take 6 minutes longer next time. If you have failed to finish, embrace your failure and use it as a learning opportunity for your next time.

Process

Having only 60 minutes is tough. Good planning and structure are essential to reach your desired outcome. Now it is time for execution.

1. Get a general understanding of the content and structure (5 min). Read very carefully through the blurb (book’s backside) and table of contents. Take your time. Every minute you spend here to select the most important or interesting chapters means saving several minutes later on.
2. Rush through the whole book (5 min). Yes, rapidly go through the whole book for the first time and skim through its text. Look for keywords and highlights to get an understanding of what the content is all about.
3. Read the book for the 2nd time and take notes (50 min). Skip the foreword. Of each chapter, read the full first paragraph. If it is of interest for you, continue reading. If not or in doubt, skip to the next chapter. Of each paragraph, read the first sentence and decide again to read further or skip. Continue this process throughout the book and only ‘actually read’ once something has caught your eye (80% should be skipped). Pay especially attention to highlighted words and phrases (italic, bold, separate box, etc) as these usually indicate key concepts. While working through the book, take notes of valuable insights but do not get lost in details.

After completion

1. Take a 15 min break. It was an intense session with a lot of new information. Your brain needs to rest to process the information.
2. Write down your 10 key learnings. It is absolutely necessary to reinforce your acquired knowledge so it can move into your long-term memory. Put away the book and all your notes. Take a few minutes to remember your main learnings and bring them to paper. It is important to concentrate on the information which easily appears in your thoughts as these are the important key concepts. If you just go through your book or notes again, you will get lost in details. Write them in a style that other people could understand them without the context.
3. Write down your 3 action steps. We are reading to change our lives for the better. If you are acquiring knowledge but not using it, you just wasted your time. Compose how you are going to apply your top 10 learnings to your daily life, in the next week or at work.

Here is one example of how I did this with the book Minimalism (highly recommendable). It’s not perfect but should suffice to show you how it could be done.

Summary

You can read any book in 1 hour. Clarify before what you want to get out of it. There are only 1–3 main ideas in each book — focus on understanding these key concepts and do not get lost in redundant explanations. Get the big picture first, then apply scan, skip, read for each chapter and paragraph. Skip 80% of the content. Take notes to teach your findings. Reinforce actionable knowledge by writing down your top 10 learnings and 3 action steps.

Four very intense days with a nearly impossible challenge of 11 books to read. But due to a shift in mindset, I somehow managed to finish the book #50 around 2 hours before the new year started. Title? Discipline equals Freedom. Now the challenge is up to you.

Got feedback or questions? Reach out to me leander.maerkisch@whu.edu

FAQ

Why not use existing book summaries? — I am using services like getabstract or blinkist and they are great for getting good insights. Still, these summaries are created for the broad public and not personally for you. Reading and summarising books by yourself gives you a steeper learning curve and the knowledge you need.

Does PowerReading work for all books? — Although it could be applied to every text, fictional novels and biography should be read in a conventional way for its primary purpose: relaxation and context.

Can I use ebooks instead of paperbacks? — Taking notes and marking cannot be done well on an e-reader. Personally, I prefer e-books despite their disadvantage as they can instantly be downloaded and do not take up extra space while travelling. If you are indifferent, work with paperback books. If you prefer e-books, keep in mind to take your notes digitally in a second tool like Evernote.

Can I apply PowerReading to large books, like 500 pages? — Yes! The idea is to extract the most useful actionable knowledge out of a book. Larger books just need better filtering.