What’s Wrong With the World, Answer #58

Call it the “sure you can, but why would you want to?” response. I just don’t get posts like this.

For those unfamiliar with Steve Pavlina, he writes a pretty popular self improvement/personal development blog at stevepavlina.com. His posts are usually quite long – that’s sort of his trademark. And while some posts are quite helpful and many are interesting, to say the least, this one leaves me cold.

Basically, Pavlina’s encouraging the audio version of speedreading – cranking up the speed on audio files in order to get the listening over with more quickly.

I have so many objections to this whole approach I don’t even know where to start. But first, a confession: I used to be exactly like this. I even posted once (somewhere – maybe even this blog in its earlier incarnation) about a website that helped you speedread internet text. I find that post embarrassing now.

My objections basically work out to this: the impulse underlying this phenomenon – wanting to speed-read, and now speed-listen, is exactly counter to solving the problem it attempts to solve: namely, too much to do and too little time in which to do it. Doing a task more quickly, simply put, is not the answer.

Think back, if you will, to the pre-computer days. You remember, the days when we didn’t have 200 emails and 894 blog feeds in our RSS reader, and 20 voice mails to listen to and process. The days when we didn’t need some book telling us how to handle all the stuff we had to do (granted, it’s a good book and yes, that’s an affiliate link). Got it? OK. Now dump it. Forget it, those days are well and truly over, and it’s a whole new ballgame. I get that – believe me, with being a single mom and running not one, not two, but three businesses, I definitely get it.

But while the problem is real, the solution is false. Reading more quickly isn’t going to make you more productive, any more than technology “solved” the problem. It just created more “stuff” to do, didn’t it? Remember those yesteryear promises, so quaint now, that had us all expecting a 2-day workweek by the year 2000? How’s that working for you? Not so great for me.

The problem is that we’re overloaded with “stuff,” and that we feel compelled to solve the problem by barreling through all that “stuff” at ever greater speeds. Hence, posts like Pavlina’s. If that works for you – I mean, really honestly works for you – leaves you more productive, more fulfilled, and less stressed – god bless, and good for you. But here’s what really happens, in my experience:

• You improve your speed, a little at first.
• You feel good! You’ve accomplished something, and you think your life’s improved as a result.
• But then, you grow fearful – maybe you didn’t really “get it” the first time. Maybe you should read or listen again, just to make sure.
• You get even faster. Yay you.
• Maybe you even get more comprehensive and thorough. Whoo-hoo.
• So – what – you get to plow through more stuff? At a faster pace? Nature abhors a vacuum, and when you create an empty space on your to-do list, you know what’s going to happen – something else will pop up to fill its place.

That doesn’t even begin to take into account the fact that – I’m sorry to say – it doesn’t really work. Yes, you can plow through Proust in an hour if you want. But what the heck are you getting out of this approach? You’re certainly not getting the beauty and magic of the language (especially not with Proust, who must be read exquisitely carefully and s-l-o-w-l-y or should not be read at all). So you can say you’ve “read” it – well, sort of. So what? Where is the accomplishment in such a task?

Here’s what I learned from my regrettable experiments with speedreading (no – not entirely regrettable, for I learned something valuable): going faster gets you nowhere, faster. What’s more, it’s completely counter to the whole “inspired” paradigm. What you need isn’t the skill to read or listen more quickly. What you need is a whole new relationship to time itself, and a brand new approach. An approach in which your time is consumed with tasks that are meaningful and in which you are fully engaged.

Zen koans teach us of “monkey mind” – that chattering, incessantly distracting internal monologue that makes any task take longer to complete and jeopardizes the quality of its completion simultaneously – and of “beginner mind” – that all-encompassing, completely open, perfectly focused “in the zone” feeling that accompanies a beginner’s efforts at any task because – here’s the lesson! – the beginner has no expectations other than the present moment, and being in it fully. Time ceases to be an impediment, in other words, because it loses its meaning when there’s no other time except the moment you’re currently experiencing.

And speed reading – or speed listening, or speed dating, or speed anything – makes that sort of relationship to the clock impossible.

Technorati Tags: speedreading, speed listening, productivity, zen, beginners mind, steve pavlina,

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