How can you read faster with ADHD?

Is slow reading really the problem?

When ADHD readers say they read slowly, they usually mean that a chapter takes forever. Time a page and the number is often normal. The chapter takes forever because the page gets read three times: once while your mind is elsewhere, once to find where it went, and once properly. Add the five minutes it takes to sit down and actually start, and the ten minutes lost to a phone check, and a twenty-minute chapter becomes an hour.

That changes the fix. If the time goes on rereading and restarting, a faster eye will not help, and a calmer setup will. It is also why the same person can tear through a thriller in a weekend and spend a month on a book they chose because they felt they should.

What does the research say about speed reading?

In 2016 a group of reading scientists led by Keith Rayner reviewed how reading works and what speed reading courses and apps claim. Their conclusion, in plain terms: there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy, and techniques that push you to read much faster, such as flashing one word at a time or suppressing the voice in your head, mostly work by skimming, with the comprehension cost that skimming brings. They found that the best route to faster reading is the slow one: reading more, so that words and topics become familiar. (Rayner and others, 2016)

One detail matters for ADHD readers. Apps that flash one word at a time in the center of the screen remove your ability to glance back, and glancing back is how a reader repairs a missed word. If your attention dips for half a second, the sentence is simply gone. Some people find the rhythm pulls them along; try it if you are curious, but test yourself afterward on what you read.

Where do ADHD readers actually lose time?

Six ways to get through more pages

1. Count rereads for one session

Put a pencil tick in the margin every time you realize you have to go back. One session is enough. If you get five ticks in twenty minutes, your speed problem is a drift problem, and the fixes for drift will do more than any speed technique.

2. Shrink the session, not the book

A ten-minute session that you finish beats a forty-minute one that dissolves after twelve. Short sessions keep attention on the page for most of the time you spend, which is the only reading speed that counts. Our reading sprints method sets this up.

3. Use a pacer if you lose your line

A finger, a card or a reading ruler under the line stops the skip-back-to-the-wrong-line problem. It is not speed reading; it simply saves the seconds you lose finding your place.

4. Stop rereading to remember

Rereading the previous chapter after every break is the single biggest time cost for many ADHD readers. A one-line note on a bookmark card, a cast list, or a recap tool that stops at your page does the same job in a minute. That is the whole case for page-locked recap apps such as Magic Bookmark: they replace the reread, not the reading.

5. Let audio carry the easy stretches

Listening at a comfortable speed moves you through a book while you walk, cook or commute, and studies comparing listening with reading for comprehension of the same text have found similar results. (Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal, 2016) Our page on audiobook speed covers how fast is too fast.

6. Choose books that pull

A book with a hook on page one and short chapters will always read faster than one you are pushing uphill. The ten-minute test tells you which kind you are holding before you have spent a week on it.

A two-week experiment

1. Week one: read as usual, and write down the number of pages you finish each day and the minutes you spent. Tick the margin for each reread.
2. Week two: change one thing only. If the ticks were high, shorten sessions. If start-up was the problem, fix the spot and the cue. If breaks were the problem, use a recap or a cast card instead of rereading.
3. Compare pages per minute of reading time, not pages per day. A better number in week two is a real speed gain, and it came from your setup.