Most people don’t really want to go back to work in the office after a nice relaxing vacation, and for many of them one of the main reasons is the huge backlog of e-mail messages waiting for them. With all of the e-mails coming in every day it’s necessary to make sure you don’t waste time on the ones that aren’t important, but that you do get the most out of the messages containing the information that you need. To save time and get through your inbox in the most efficient way, try these useful tips:

Start using keyword searches. Even if you’ve got 50 e-mails from the same department, they might not all be about the same thing. Do a quick keyword search using a term that you know is likely to be in the messages that you need to see – for example, the word project or meeting. If you’re working on something specific with a group, pick a term that relates to your current task, such as upgrade or rollout. The most timely messages should pop to the top of the list, and the messages about the upcoming birthday potluck will fall to the bottom.

Identify key collaborators. Many e-mail services allow you to set up different groups and assign people to those groups. If you can identify the people whose messages you almost always need to read right away, you can put them in one or two separate groups, and go to those messages first.

Stay away from the crowds. While there might be company-wide e-mails sent out that you do need to read, many people use the “send to all” feature much more often than they need to. You’ll probably be able to immediately see whether you’re one of a hundred others on an e-mail list, and just by looking at the number of people who received the message you’ll get an idea if you’ve been sent the message for no particular reason other than that you’re in someone’s e-mail address book.

Highlight the important information. If you can use your e-mail service to automatically assign a color flag to certain senders or keywords you’ll have an easy way to visually sort through your inbox before you go any further. You’ll be able to quickly spot the red-flagged or urgent messages and handle those first.

Let the system do the sorting. This might be something you need to work with a systems administrator on, but it’s likely that there is a way for you to set up folders and have the e-mail system automatically route messages into those folder, either by keyword topic or by sender. In addition, you can make sure that people who you need to communicate with by e-mail set up their systems to use the same method, and your folder will serve as the go-to spot for all of your e-mails, so that they don’t get lost among the hundreds of others you receive in your main mailbox.

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The Internet revolutionized reading in the 21st century, something everybody realizes now. The numbers alone speak volumes: 11 years ago about 22% of Americans chose the Internet to get their news, but in 2013, that number had risen to 39%. The statistics are revealing, and attest to the fact that e-books, news, entertainment, and communication are all taking place online.

Online, tech-based reading is on the rise

According to Kathryn Zickuhr, Internet researcher at the Pew Research Center, 55% of Americans own a smartphone and 24% an e-reader.

E-reading is a trend that continues to grow. In 2011, only 16% of the American participants in the Pew study read an ebook, but in 2012 that number rose to 23%. Print book reading dropped from 72% to 67% from 2011 to 2012. Again, there’s a strong but gradual tendency to read more ebooks than paper ones.

Rituals that are intimacy-based favor print book reading

While traditional reading rituals like reading with a child or with another person are still mostly likely to be done with print books, participants in the study who commuted regularly confirmed that ebooks are their preferred medium for reading when travelling. Not only does an e-reader have the advantage of letting you keep a wider selection of books available, it allows you to access new books easily and quickly.

The future of libraries

Libraries are not dying, and many people still visit them. In fact, 73% of the people surveyed visit a library with the express purpose of borrowing books.

What’s been noticeably absent from libraries is the time spent in them. People generally no longer browse shelves as frequently. They find the books in the library’s website, reserve them on line, and go pick them up, a time-saving approach that librarians say is on the rise.

As the purpose of libraries shifts, their cultural role is becoming even stronger. People regard libraries as community spaces for ongoing cultural expression and communication. Lectures, cultural events, and meetings are all part of the many activities taking place at libraries today, giving them a role in peoples’ lives beyond studying and reading books.

Reader expectations changing

Online content is changing the expectations of readers. The print book is not going to be replaced any time soon, but libraries are already feeling the need to adjust to a more tech-based environment.

In fact, the survey illustrated that people are keen to use tech services like pre-loaded ebooks, or classes on how to use e-readers. Most modern libraries have online catalogs that let people borrow library-owned e-books, and even the smallest library is striving to offer more automated and online services to the public.

As we move into a digital era of content dissemination, the need for libraries and other cultural institutions to keep up with technology will not decrease. Libraries that stubbornly refuse to offer online facilities like ebook borrowing, free access to databases, and digitized books will run the risk of being neglected and forgotten. Technology is changing the reading expectations of modern readers, and society – and its libraries – has to respond accordingly and promptly.

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Does the brain process language differently when text is on paper than when it’s read on an e-reader? Is it a myth that when we read on computer screens we cannot be as focused on what we are reading, or does science prove otherwise?

Digital reading has become very popular for many reasons. Some people prefer digital books for practical reasons of portability and cost-effectiveness, others for ecological ones.

Millions of people have already integrated the two reading modes, or completely switched to digital reading. All of the trends reveal that the popularity of e-reading will keep growing – but the debate over which is best may never be resolved. Here’s a look at the three main factors that make digital and paper-based reading so different:

Digital reading requires different cognitive resources than paper-based reading.

When people read on paper their cognitive processes related to reading are complemented and reinforced by the tactile stimuli of the experience.

This physical component that the hard-copy book provides doesn’t exist when we read on computer screens and e-readers, a fact that explains why reading comprehension in digital-based reading is often significantly lower when compared to comprehension when reading print media.

This study published in the International Journal of Educational Research looked into how reading modality affects reading comprehension, and found that students reading on digital screens did worse than their counterparts reading on paper.
What seems to compromise reading comprehension during digital reading is an issue that is a part of the medium itself. It seems that the cognitively heavy task of navigation using an e-reader or computer (buttons, keys to push, even tactile screen scrolling) is something that has a high potential to distract the reader, and that distraction has a toll on reading comprehension.

A difference in portability and cost-effectiveness.

The paper book is still widely used and read around the world, and despite the markedly important growth of digital reading, printed books have their unrelenting fans. However, even die-hard fans of print books admit the perks of the digital book: it’s green, it’s portable, and it’s significantly cheaper.

Reading on screen means less tree pulp wasted, and more and cheaper books easily carried around. These three attributes of the digital book obviously promote increased reading. If people can carry several books with them, they’re more likely to read while commuting to work rather than playing Angry Birds.

Book reading and the sense of control.

Digital reading is fluid and open-ended, but this means at times it’s hard to manage, both cognitively and physically. On the other hand, a paper book gives the reader increased control over the reading process.

A pdf file or an e-book gives you no tactile power whatsoever. You need to repeatedly click on the keys or scroll, scroll, and scroll again to find a paragraph you’ve missed or to re-read a passage you loved. All of that takes time, and leads to a loss in concentration and interest.

When reading paper-based content , though, you the reader are in charge. You flick through pages easily and re-reading a favorite passage is tied to the physicality of the activity of turning those pages, giving a sense of great control over what’s being read and ultimately understood.

Superficial reading and its aftereffects.

What’s more, this lack of physicality with digital reading – and of course the sheer volume of digital content available – makes digital readers more inclined to be “skim and scan” readers. People don’t pay attention to digital copy the way they do with paper-based text. Digital reading prompts careless, hurried reading, because the modality is much more difficult to keep focused on – ads pop up, social networks notifications distract you, and so on.

Researchers are keen to understand how reading modality affects reading efficiency. Preliminary findings suggest that the two are very different cognitive processes, with a different set of requirements in place.

Whether one is better than the other is of little importance. What’s important to understand in this debate is that the two are distinctively different, and for their enthusiasts, each one is the best.

Cross-posted on the 7 Speed Reading blog.

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Next time you’re bored out of your mind, don’t reach for your smartphone, reach for a book instead. Reading books provides a range of benefits you may not be aware of. In fact, the more books you
read, the more awesome you will be.

Reading makes you (more) empathetic

Reading fiction gives you an inside peek into scenarios and realities you couldn’t otherwise live yourself. This opens up your critical thinking capabilities and activates your empathy sensors. You become more aware and sensitive to people’s plights, cultures, and customs, and feel more forgiving and nurturing where you might have once been condescending or inflexible.

Reading is an immersive experience

A good novel will have you questioning reality. A good novel will drag you so deeply into its plot that your identification with the protagonist will be mind-blowing and reality-blurring. Enough said.

Reading is knowledge

You can watch a documentary or tutorial to learn a new skill but nothing beats the original experience of reading, processing, and understanding new knowledge or how-tos all by yourself.

Reading is a bottomless chest from which you will always be able to get a few jewels — with each book and each tale.

Reading is traveling for your soul

Reading helps you leave all your workaday troubles behind, even if for a short moment. It empties your mind until you’re powerful enough to confront your daily demons.

Reading is entertainment

For the bibliophiles out there, reading is a matchless experience. Reading gives you immense joy. It engages your senses and enthralls your mind with scenery, plots, and mind-blowing images.

Reading makes you interesting

From learning smart, little-known facts, to initiating great discussions with friends, reading makes you a knowledgeable, interesting person people will love to hang out with.

Reading is inspiration

Reading stimulates your creativity. You start thinking critically and more boldly, all because you’ve already been exposed to various scenarios and have garnered the tools and knowledge to be less ordinary and more unique.

Reading is growth

Even if you don’t read a self-improvement book per se, virtually any well-written book will help you become a better person. From building your self-esteem to becoming better at decision-making, books give you the tools to cope with life’s conundrums — and the ever-important Zombie apocalypse.

Reading is power

It’s a cliché but it’s nonetheless true: reading empowers you. The knowledge and worlds you experience when reading give you confidence and wisdom on how to deal with real life situations more gracefully and wisely.

Reading is your key to becoming a better person in all aspects of your life

Reading is how you improve your marketability, your communication skills, your empathy and emotional intelligence, your appeal — and even your sexiness. Reading is one of the few habits known to man that you can never have too much of. So go on, read on!

Bonus benefit

If you speed read you get to reap all these benefits in a shorter time. Awesome, right?

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Scientists recently looked into the brain activity of people caught up in reading a page-turner, J. K. Rowling’s popular “Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone.” The experiment helped measure brain activity during reading, and it is shedding light on the questions surrounding how our brains work, how they make sense of reality, and what they experience when we read.

The eight subjects that participated in the Carnegie Mellon University were reading the ninth chapter of the first Harry Potter book, one that revolves around a flying lesson.

What scientists discovered is that when the participants were reading about the movements and efforts of Harry Potter to ride his broom and fly, this activated the brain regions that people use when they try to detect and understand other people’s movements. In other words, reading and interpreting real-life events activate the same brain regions.

The flying lesson chapter the participants were asked to read was also one laden with emotions. In this chapter, Harry is confronted with the bully Malfoy and at one point meets a three-headed dog. The many events and emotions described in this chapter helped scientists extract some important conclusions from the study.

The scientists discovered that during the reading experiment, when people were reading about a person’s point of view or character, the brain region that lit up was the one associated with how people interpret other people’s actions. As the scientists explain, “Similarly, the characters in the story are associated with activation in the same brain region we use to process other people’s intentions.” Source

This reveals that what we read truly engages our brain and activates complex processes so that we can understand  what we’re reading, both in terms of language and in terms of narrative.

In other words, whether we’re reading about how a protagonist tries to decipher a person’s actions by trying to figure out what their intentions are, or whether we are trying to decipher these intentions in a person sitting next to us, the same brain regions come into play.

While previous studies focused on individual words and sentences to understand how the brain processes language, by looking at language and brain activity through the act of reading, we get a much richer overview of how the brain responds to this complex process. The reader is expected to decipher the meaning of words and put this meaning in context. The reader needs to use grammar and context clues, and at the same time keep up with how the characters develop and how the plot proceeds through the various events introduced in the narrative.

This research is a big step towards better understanding of how the brain operates and processes visual and linguistic stimuli, and how reading affects our brain. It’s not the first time that scientists have used reading as the vehicle for monitoring brain activity. Reading is a cognitively complex process that seems to hold the key to many of our brain’s mysteries — mysteries that, as yet, are still unsolved.

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It seems that everyone is in a constant frenzied pursuit of more happiness, more money, more skills, more power. This pursuit doesn’t have to be entirely random and chaotic, though. You can achieve all these things if you can prioritize wisely. For instance, you cannot earn more money if you lack the necessary tech skills to succeed in the modern marketplace, and you cannot find everlasting happiness unless you engage in some self-reflection and life evaluation first.

If you combine new and modern skills with tried-and-true wisdom, you will be able to prepare yourself for a brighter future.

Leadership

Leadership is an umbrella term for being an assertive, resourceful, and confident individual. A leader is someone who’s bold enough to take risks, and yet wise enough to take these risks only at the most appropriate times.

Leadership is an attribute that will make you stand out and help you achieve more in life.

Emotional Intelligence

While our school curriculum focuses on teaching us math, science, languages and other skills, what classes are we taking that nurture and grow our emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is more than a fancy, trendy term. It’s an ability that’s essential in our homes, our offices, our societies, and our schools.

Emotional intelligence is an increased empathy, sensitivity, and awareness of your own feelings, moods, and attitude – as well as those of others. Emotional intelligence helps you make the most out of your personal potential, and also avoid interpersonal crises while nurturing a benevolent overall culture in all possible contexts.

Time Management

Time management is an essential skill. In fact, time management is the alpha and the omega when it comes to conquering goal after goal. With good time management comes better organizational skills, and the two combined ensure you can reach your goals in a time-efficient, impressive fashion.

Teamwork

In the world of digital collaboration, massive open online courses, and Ed Tech, it’s obvious that without basic teamwork you cannot achieve everything you want. In fact, you will achieve more if you don’t always work alone. Studies are now focusing on the fact that solitary work habits cannot compete with the results and side benefits of collaboration.

Cultivate your teamwork skills and you will realize the true power of collaborative thinking and acting at your job, in your home, and with your family and friends.

Tech Skills

Innate and learned skills will only get you so far if they don’t relate to today’s modern lifestyle. Our world is a tech-driven one, and if you are not adept at using new technologies, chances are you’re going to be left behind.

While you watch other people speed read and touch type their way to success, you will be struggling with slow-paced skills and outdated keyboarding techniques. The only way forward is by being time-efficient at everything you do.

Speed Reading

Since the digital content revolution, the amount of new knowledge syndicated every minute grows nonstop. This has made many people anxious and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content they must handle every day in order to keep themselves up to date with new developments.

That’s where speed reading comes in. With speed reading, you can read efficiently and always be in the know. If knowledge is power, with speed reading you become invincible.

Touch Typing

Another time-based skill is keyboarding. With work, entertainment, and communication being mostly done through computer monitors and touch screens, it’s only reasonable to want to improve your touch typing skills and make the most out of your time every day.

Digital Literacy

Educational platforms, mobile apps, the Cloud, online research, blogging and coding. The list of tech skills we are expected to at least be aware of is continually growing.

While it’s probably not realistic to try to master all possible tech skills, having a general idea as to the most popular and essential ones will ensure you can keep up with the rest of the competition and make certain your lack of digital literacy doesn’t stand in the way of your aspirations.

It’s true that “business skills” is a vague concept simply because it encompasses so many varied and often contradictory qualifications. Some insist that essential business skills are leadership and organization, while others point out more human-centric ones such as kindness and empathy— always depending of course on what kind of business we’re talking about in terms of size, niche, and mission.

Nonetheless, there are certain timeless business skills that can leverage any company’s success. The diversity of business skills mentioned below might seem daunting or even impossible for a single person, but through persistent effort, any skill can be mastered.

Business Management

Finance Management

A business’ sole reason for existence is profit, so it’s essential to be able to financially monitor your business so that the right choices will lead to sales and profit increases. Basic financial concepts, software, and strategic business approaches are necessary in building a solid basis for your business.

Human Resources Management

Business management is about efficiently taking care of your employees. This includes:

• providing them incentives and adequate training to keep them up with the latest developments,

• providing a fruitful, non-threatening environment to work in

• ensuring your employees are at all times satisfied with their work environment and invested in the success of your business

Vision Plus Passion

These two could easily be labeled personality traits, but we feel they’re learnable skills. Having passion and vision allows anyone to succeed; these are qualities that drive innovation, creativity, and success no matter your niche or product. Vision is what will get you ahead of the competition and onto the right route; passion is what will keep you motivated enough to keep trying until you achieve your company’s goals.

Adaptability

The times when sticking to insufficient patterns and approaches are long behind us. Today’s business models are about flexibility and swift adaptability to new conditions. Strategies might be efficient but they’re never 100% under your control, because there are circumstances that will affect your business that are beyond your reach. The sooner you can acknowledge their irreversibility and try to adapt to these changes, the smaller the loss for you.

Strategic Planning and Decision Making

It ultimately boils down to making all the right choices. It’s about critically and thoroughly exhausting all possibilities to arrive at the desired end-point fast, unharmed, stronger than before. Strategic planning and decision making are two aspect of business management you will be confronted with, day in and day out. The more proficient you are in the techniques and approaches available to you, the better the choices you’ll make.

Trusting Others

People with start-ups often have this irrational urge to have everything under their own personal control. But as a business grows and gathers more opportunities for expansion, the efficiency with which a business can be managed by one person drops dramatically.

You see, it’s a skill to acknowledge your own limitations, to admit that you cannot control everything and everyone, and that sometimes it’s okay to delegate some tasks to other people. Trust doesn’t stop here, however. It’s not enough to be willing to assign tasks to people, it’s also about choosing the most competent person for each task. Now that’s a challenge.

Networking and Marketing Skills

Marketing Strategies

Increasing sales can be achieved with strategic marketing campaigns. Freebies, sweepstakes, and contests can gain your brand visibility and encourage people to talk about your business. Promoting your products/services to new audiences and focusing on target groups you may have previously thought of as irrelevant is a skill you ought to acquire if you wish to have constant (though sometimes gradual) growth.

Establishing Lasting Relationships

Good connections with existing customers increase loyalty and return customer numbers. Customer loyalty doesn’t just happen – it requires perseverance on your part to keep your customers engaged, interested, and willing to return to your doorstep, virtual or physical. Social media marketing is becoming ubiquitous and it’s certainly a skill that is easily learned but capable of increasing engagement and driving sales.

Becoming An Industry-Leading Company

Yes, even this is a skill: the skill to identify new trends or paradigm shifts early on, before your competition, and ease into an industry change smoothly and loss-free.

Other Business Management Skills

Bravery

It all boils down to being brave. If you’re brave you will find the courage to be honest with an under-performing employee, or have the power to acknowledge your own mistakes rather than ignoring them.

Speed Reading

In order to keep up with all the news and developments in your field and beyond, you must have speed reading skills, otherwise you’ll be lost in a sea of information. If you’re a slow reader, research can actually be a counterproductive process, taking away valuable time and providing you with only marginal benefits and little new knowledge. Speed reading software is a powerful tool that can increase your reading speed, helping you to always be on top of what’s happening and what you can do to implement new strategies.

Time Management

As illustrated by the reading skills issue discussed above, time is an ever-present limitation for any business. Time management is a must-have tool, helping you efficiently organize your time and energy, prioritize the most significant tasks, and deliver to the best of your power.

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I am reading. You are reading. Grandma’s reading and father’s reading too. This is not a nursery rhyme, it’s a manifesto about reading’s universal appeal and importance.

Everybody has the right to read, no matter their age. More importantly, there’s really no clear category distinction as to what a person can read and when. If you’re a 52 year old mother of three and enjoy reading Young Adult literature, that’s OK. If you find The Little Prince mesmerizing after all these years and enjoy reading it to your 3-year old girl more than she likes to listen to it, that’s also OK. Reading as a habit has a multitude of benefits, and putting artificial restrictions on this habit, or constricting the scope of reading options, is rather pointless.

Reading for Young Children

Children that get into the habit of reading will be pleased and astonished by how quickly it becomes their preferred medium of gaining knowledge, losing themselves in fantasy, and expressing their creativity.

Reading unveils an immense world of countless possibilities for them. It educates them, makes them laugh, and gives them hints and clues as to what life is about. Most of the time, they don’t even realize that they’re being taught as they read.

For example, Dr. Seuss’s popular “The Star-Bellied Sneetches” is a book that uses a funny plot line to share important underlying lessons on discrimination, prejudice, and tolerance. Getting children to love reading ensures that they learn to nurture noble values and develop strong ethics and a forward-thinking worldview.

Reading for Young Adults – Adult Literature

As adolescents, many children dive into reading as a way of finding answers to thorny questions on identity, existence, sexuality, relationships, feelings, and romance.

But that’s not the only reason adolescents read. They read because reading is fun – because what they get from reading is extraordinary. Literature generously gives them inside peeks into new worlds, new tools for thinking, for being brave, for resolving issues, and for making sense of our often confusing (as some authors present it, approaching dystopic) and tech-driven lives.

Adults resort to books for the same reasons, much of the time. No matter the genre, the pursuit is always the same: a mental escape, a storehouse of new knowledge, a new way of thinking, a new breathtaking world shared between author and reader. Adults can explore difficult philosophical works to help them gain a wider understanding of the world, or revisit their youth by rereading some of their childhood favorites.

Reading for Seniors

Once you’ve been bitten by the (reading) bug, there’s no way of letting go of it. Reading becomes a daily habit that you return to, no matter what. It becomes your constant in a world permeated by continuous change and unpredictability.

But reading when you’re older is not just matter of habit. In numerous studies reading has been confirmed to help combat brain aging, and many studies have shown that reading keeps people’s thinking agile. Even everyday functions like reacting to traffic light changes or identifying a phone number improve thanks to habitual reading.

Reading for All

The extraordinary experience of reading a printed book is one that has endured for centuries. It hasn’t been compromised or weakened despite the growing popularity of other reading media like the Internet and ereaders. Instead, these new ways of reading has ensured that it has become a habit deeply entrenched in our daily lives.

We read hardcopy novels, we read digital blogs, and we learn about the latest news through the online New York Times. Reading is something that ties us together and allows us to share experiences through the stories that we tell.

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It’s 2015 already, but did you keep up with last year’s software reviews on speed reading software, 7 Speed Reading™? If 2015 is the year you are planning on mastering speed reading, then you ought to read what others say about eReflect’s reading improvement program.

Top Ten Reviews gives 7 Speed Reading™ a near perfect rating, 99.5%

Top Ten Reviews, a renowned software evaluator trusted by millions of Internet users, had put eReflect’s software to the test. After rigorous assessments the editor announced that the program is a leader in its category, giving the software a 9.95/10 score.

In a detailed review of the software’s features and technologies, the Top Ten Reviews editor focuses on five aspects of the program: its reading level and exercises (9.8/10), methods and materials available (10/10), features set (10/10), reporting (10/10), and finally help and support (10/10). The reviewer, Noel Case, emphasizes that the software’s entertaining and complete approach to teaching speed reading are unrivaled.

But that was in 2014.

Top Ten Reviews rates 7 Speed Reading™ with 9.95/10 for 2015

For its 2015 rankings, Top Ten Reviews insisted on its previous stellar ratings of 7 Speed Reading™ . The verdict comes as no surprise, as the editors note, saying, “User friendly, feature rich and effective, 7 Speed Reading is the best speed-reading application on the market.”

Typing Lounge and Mark Ways acknowledge 7 Speed Reading™’s superiority

Typing Lounge is another site that thoroughly tested and evaluated 7 Speed Reading™ against other reading improvement software products. Typing Lounge and Mark Ways have found that 7 Speed Reading™ offers a unique set of features and technologies that make it stand out from its competition. The reviewer stated in his 2014 review that 7 Speed Reading™ has industry-leading status thanks to its unrivaled combination of capacities and features.

Spreeder emphasizes 7 Speed Reading™’s effectiveness

A child project of 7 Speed Reading™, Spreeder, offers a review of and in-depth look at the program. This website focused the evaluation on how the program is essential in the classroom, listing the ways it is able to help children improve their reading habits and let go of habits that sabotage their academic performance.

Spreeder asserts that speed reading helps students master reading and other reading-related assignments much faster and effortlessly, motivating them to keep improving their academic efficiency. For the latest reviews of the 7 Speed Reading™ 2015 check here.

Cross-posted on the 7 Speed Reading blog.

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