Before getting into the nitty gritty of productive skill, I’m going to start this article with a poignant example from my own life.
When my father moved to Rhode Island from New York state, he continued to travel to and from upstate New York to see his parents. He had a route all set up, and he would embark on a 4 hour 30 minute journey Hudson. It wasn’t a short drive – and it wasn’t always an easy one when he had to drive up there in his big clunky work van – but it was worth it for him to see his parents and his sister.
12 years go by after his move to RI, and my father continued to make these regular trips. One fateful night, he took a different turn by accident and continued on his way as best he could. He got there in 3 hours and 30 minutes.
He did not get a faster car, he did not drive more aggressively, and my grandparents certainly didn’t move any closer to Rhode Island.
He had found a new route, a much better route – after over a decade of taking the “long way.”
He stumbled upon something so obvious now that he looked at it. With a little bit more homework, the driving time was dropped to just above 3 hours. Take a second and think about the magnitude of this pathfinding realization. Lets draw up the rough math:
12 years x 4 trips/year x 2 hours/trip (1 hour saved by new route, one hour saved going down) = 96 hours.
Thats 4 entire days on the road, because the most direct route wasn’t known. The strange thing is, all of us have an issue like this – we’re doing activities a specific way when in fact putting forth a bit more energy would produce so much more in terms of results – and probably green paper.
In this article I’m going to identify a handful of these potential slow factors in your life:
Proper Driving Routes:
Like my father, you might may be driving the “long way” to get where you want to be. This might be visiting family a few hours away, or it might even be the route from the grocery store to work. It odds are, there are at least a few routes that you take on a regular basis that are in fact taking you out of your way.
This might be the way from your house to the bank, or from the bank to work, or from work to your friends house. We can probably all think of one or two routes that we “wing it” with, I know I used to have my share of mine. If we took just a bit more time to find the quickest way, we’d shave hours and hours off our annual driving time. If you run that same incorrect path 30 times in a year, how many hours and ways is that ending up to be.
For this reason, it makes sense to double-check your routes on longer trips, especially trips you do regularly. You might check a few online directional sites, an even experiment with different paths to the destination. It might help you on a more daily basis to know your local town’s roads like the back of your hand. This doesn’t have to involve any more than a map (which again you could print easily from one of many directional sites, including Google Maps).
Then when you get home from the bank and think “I feel like that’s not the quickest way…”, its not going to fade into the background – you can look it up and check. Knowing that you’re running your daily tasks through the absolute best routes is comforting, but more importantly you’re spending less hours “in car,” burning less gas, and getting more done, quicker.
Speed Reading:
Do you mouth out words while you read them? Do you often backtrack to re-read what you’ve already read as a kind of double-check? If you’ve got habits like these, its unlikely that you’re reading much more than 200 words per minute.
When you think about the volume of email and reading material that’s likely in your life, reading at this speed shouldn’t be acceptable. In fact, more people should be able to double their reading speed without loosing comprehension. I did it in a month or so (check the “Life Experiment” category).
Reading twice as swiftly not only translates to getting more done at work, but also to learning more in your personal studies and snatching info off of highway signs more effectively as you’re driving by. I would recommend buying a peed reading book and practicing at least a few times a week for a few hours, you will see massive jumps in your reading speed within the first week.
In many ways, reading slowly is much like driving the wrong route. You’re going somewhere – but much less efficiently than you should. Just like finding a new route, learning to read more effectively takes a little effort at home – but far less than you’d be spending driving the wrong roads or reading entire books at a molasses-like pace.
Part 2 coming up soon!
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