Sometimes, fast-paced lifestyles don’t cut it. You’d think that reading, eating and working faster would catapult your productivity into a new level of efficiency, but the truth is  that such an energy-depleting way of living can lead to burnout instead.

There’s only so much stress and pressure one person can handle. While power drinks and coffee might offer you that desperately needed push, sometimes to be productive you must slow down. Yes, I said slow down.

Before you dismiss my proposal as impossible, hear me out. It might sound ironic but it’s true; we’ve been trained to think that the faster we engage with tasks the better our results. But this is only partially true. If what we’re after is long-term, sustainable productivity then the key is to slow down a bit. With less stress burdening your shoulders you boost your clarity and efficiency, ultimately allowing yourself to be more productive.

Thanks, but no thanks

It’s important to turn down extra projects, overtime work, and anything else that puts extra strain on your already packed schedule. If people come to know you as the “yes, of course I will” person, then you will soon find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of tasks and responsibilities constantly deluging you, and you’ll find it increasingly harder to say “no.”

Saying “sorry, no” reminds people of your own humanity and limitations, and its nurtures others’ respect for you. Fewer responsibilities mean less workload, which then equals better productivity. Simple math here.

It’s all in the present moment

To manage to be productive even at a slowed-down pace requires that you practice mindfulness. Stop worrying over others’ future expectations and opinions of you. Rather, focus on what you need and should accomplish right now.

You can do this by focusing in the present moment. Forget the bigger picture and just be at peace with what you didn’t manage to do (your past) and what you should do (your future). This way you are mindful of what you’re capable of achieving right this moment.

This realization is what will boost your productivity, even if you are working in what it seems to be ridiculously slow-motion.

Sleep, what’s that?

It shouldn’t be optional, period. Sleep has been found to be more important than exercise and its essential role in your well-being is unquestionable. Sleep helps you better control your diet and food intake, while sleep deprivation makes you prone to mistakes and less resistant to fatty and sugary snacks.

With more sleep, you will achieve a consistent and enhanced brain functionality, increase your alertness, and overall perform better with less effort. No project, event or circumstance is more important than sleep.

Our society fosters fast-paced lifestyles; we’re expected to speed read, touch type at 150 wpm, and constantly multi-task so that we can fit everything we need to do into a tight 24 hour time frame. While this increased speed can improve our productivity in the short term, slowing down is important for both our well-being and work performance.  Having overwhelming schedules is not obligatory. It’s an option, and a choice we make each day.

You can change this by being more mindful of your daily routines, focusing more on your health and well-being by resting, turning down more responsibilities, getting enough sleep, and just slowing down from time to time, to recuperate.

Experience fosters learning. No matter how much you may wish you could download skills and knowledge into your brain, the only foolproof way of mastering anything in life is through experience. And by experience, we mean “trial and error.”

Virtually any skill – speed reading, touch typing, walking, speaking a foreign language – requires substantial amounts of time invested in practicing. During a 1957 press conference, William Faulkner was asked for his advice to young, aspiring writers. This was his reply:

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance.

On a similar vein, Aristotle asserted the same principle of experiential learning, hundreds of years before Faulkner:

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

This is the basic premise that underlines experiential learning (learning from experience). We don’t first learn something and then do it, rather we learn it by doing it. In other words, practice precedes learning and experience is a prerequisite for mastery. You cannot expect to speed read just by reading a book about speed reading, but the moment you experience and practice that skill you become a speed reader.

Experiential education is what allows a person to fully immerse themselves in the learning of a skill or capacity, and it’s what produces the most impressive learning results. According to psychologist David Kolb, knowledge is the product of experience. When a person is having a concrete experience, for example when they’re learning touch typing, this physical experience is what will allow the beginning typist to mentally reflect on their performance and produce their own interpretation of the process. With these abstract interpretations of the learning experience the typist is then back in the physical realm, actively testing out their assertions; this cycle is what ultimately results in learning to touch type. We repeat this process of practice, reflection, concept formation, and re-testing until learning takes place.

This approach to learning, like all others, of course has its flaws. Many people point out this theory’s inability to explain how people also learn without reflecting on the learning process. A common example is the fact that a person can learn how to tie their shoelaces through repetition, rather than reflecting on the process.

Nonetheless, the reflective aspect of experiential learning has a wide range of benefits and functions. With experiential learning, for example, we increase our self-esteem because we succeed in teaching ourselves something new by actively applying the new knowledge. This process is rewarding and gives a big boost to self-confidence because it has tangible results the learner can immediately recognize.

Theory turns into knowledge when we’re allowed to participate in our learning in a mindful, receptive, and attentive manner. What’s more, experiential learning is what will offer us the confirmation that learning indeed took place, that we’ve mastered a new skill and we’re ready to advance it even further. Whenever you have the chance, choose to learn through experience and practice rather than in the abstract. The results will astonish you.

Mind-mapping is visual thinking. It’s an information processing model that lets you represent information in a way that involves a part of your brain that helps you see connections. You can tell from recent technological and cultural trends that visualization and graphic imagery is gaining ground as an effective form of presenting information.

Think of Pinterest and infographics for instance; both are image-based models of information portrayal and their popularity keeps on increasing.

Mind-mapping skills help you process information quickly and easily and let you retrieve that information at any time. When combined, mind-mapping and speed reading can become your tools for achieving astonishing new records of information assimilation.

Why mind-mapping will help you process information faster:

Succinct

You can succinctly illustrate complex relationships (causation, correlation) by activating your mind-mapping skills. When reading you can visually represent, either mentally or on paper, incoming information in ways that are instantly understood.

In particular, if mind mapping is done in your head, you can save yourself great amounts of information processing time, boosting your reading speed even further.

Information-friendly

Another characteristic of mind-mapping is that it’s the ideal method when it comes to factual information processing and acquisition. Being efficient in mind-mapping means you are capable of easily identifying key connections, grasping complex concepts, and arriving at conclusions fast and correctly.

Think of mind-mapping as your tool for taking information and turning it into active knowledge. When speed reading you need an approach that takes information, processes it and yields back knowledge, all done at high speed. That’s what mind-mapping does, by helping you process and understand new information. With such an efficiency tool, you are more likely to read faster, thereby increasing your productivity and overall benefits.

Time-efficient

Mind-mapping helps increase your reading efficiency. It allows you to create visual images on the go; every new clue, sentence or paragraph is processed and added to the existing network of connections and relationships. In this manner, your knowledge continues to grow at an efficient speed and pace.

These three features of mind-mapping – being succinct, information-friendly and time-efficient – are what makes it a great skill to consider if you wish to read and assimilate new information faster.

While speed reading as an approach is a complete method in itself, by using this technique along with mind-mapping you can unlock more of speed reading’s power in the struggle to conquer information overload.

Advantages of Mind-mapping

One of the major advantages of mind mapping is that it’s a system that favors information retention and usage.

Mind-mapping is more than visually processing/representing information, it’s about finding ways to understand, store and use new information in an efficient, instant and productive manner.

Another advantage of mind-mapping is that it’s an integrated approach to information processing. It forces you to connect new to existing information, draw complex conclusions, see the bigger picture, revise previous and irrelevant opinions and overall, become a critical thinker who actively engages with information in order to transform it into knowledge.

In a nutshell, mind-mapping makes reading strategic and purposeful.

The relationship  between mind-mapping and speed reading is a mutually reinforcing one. The better you become in one, the better the other will become. This is a process that keeps evolving the more you practice, making you a better, faster reader with an outstanding amount of knowledge and wisdom at your fingertips.

Have you heard of the word “autodidacticism”? It’s a compound word made from the roots auto- (Greek for self, same) and didacticism (education, learning). Autodidacticism therefore means “self-education” – the process of willingly immersing yourself in a body of knowledge in order to obtain new insights, skills, or information.

In other words, whenever you are teaching yourself something you’re considered a self-teacher, an autodidact.

An autodidact is someone who critically and willingly seeks out knowledge. Autodidacticism is by definition the informal, private, self-teaching process during which the self-educator gathers, processes, absorbs, and uses new knowledge.

Who’s an autodidact then?

Anyone can be an autodidact! An 8-year old girl who, led by curiosity, flicks through “Vanity Fair” (either the book or the magazine) is exhibiting an autodidactic tendency, for instance.

At any time when a person is making a focused attempt to acquire new knowledge in a private setting, this is considered autodidacticism. So, by and large, when a person expresses a motivation or willingness to learn something, he or she is an autodidact.

Autodidacticism fact sheet

• An autodidact is a self-educator, someone who is a teacher and a learner at the same time
• Autodidacticism is often carried out informally and privately, although an autodidact might consult and discuss with others to elaborate or challenge what he/she learns
• Autodidacticism can start at any point in a person’s life and end (or not) when desired
• Autodidacticism is not limited to using books; from craftsmanship skills to history and astronomy, virtually any material is considered an appropriate body of knowledge
• Autodidacticism stems from a person’s need to acquire more knowledge than other settings (school, family, friends) are capable of providing
• Autodidacticism is the result of human inquisitiveness, the urge to engage with lifelong learning on a discipline or matter you are passionate about

Key features of autodidacticism

• The self-learner has full control over their learning (from topic to knowledge depth, to study hours and learning approach)
• Autodidacticism is often spurred by the individual’s passion and thirst for knowledge
• Unlike conventional educational settings, autodidacticism is a conscious, self-imposed activity the learner takes great pleasure in

How do you become an autodidact?

Everyone at one point or another has  engaged with autodidacticism. Reading a poem at school and then going to the public library to read more of that talented artist’s work, being inspired by a friend’s soap-making talent and then watching YouTube videos to learn how to make soap yourself, even trying out a new recipe – these are all examples of autodidacticism.

Find a hobby, craft, discipline, art, or sport you’re passionate about. The first step to mastering it is immersing yourself in the existing literature and documentation around it. This could be anything from books and online articles, to videos and discussions with experts about it.

Autodidacticism is greatly advanced when you have a fit, strong memory. A good memory helps you process and understand new knowledge at your own pace by recalling it often for deeper, critical processing.

Autodidacticism is a completely beneficial habit to acquire. It ensures you learn things of true interest that help you become a better qualified person in what you love and are passionate about. Being a self-taught individual gives you a discerning edge over those who don’t engage with lifelong self-directed learning. If there’s a good time to become an autodidact, it’s now!

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