Increase Your Reading Efficiency With These 5 Apps

Because, without revision, and recall, reading won’t help you much

With no conscious efforts, till today, some nursery rhymes I learned over 50 years ago are still stuck in my memory. You probably have similar hold-fast-recalls that refuse to go away. Who won’t like to have massively retentive and quick-recall memories like that? This where reading efficiency comes in.

By reading efficiency, I mean the ability to recall most of what you read.

How did you feel after writing the last paper in your last school exam? If the course has been a trying or tasking one, you probably sighed in relief, “Thank goodness, I’m over and done with it.” Probably you’ve forgotten most if not all of what you studied (sorry, crammed) as soon as the exam was over. You are not alone. I confess I was one of them.

Back at school, the acronym 3R —standing for Read, Revise, Recite (Recall). helps us remember what we’ve learned or read. At the heart of 3R is the given — learning actively helps us remember and retain our new knowledge for longer.

Not only do you need 3R to improve your reading comprehension and retention capacity, you also need to practice. Practising is non-negotiable for excellent performance in all field. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule outlined in his book Outliers — The Story of Success, comes to mind.

Also, in other to achieve excellence in any field long term dedication and deliberate practice is a must. Deliberate practise as defined by Professor K. Anders Ericcson and others is;

…a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide clues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance.

Without these, exceptional performance in any chosen field will be a mirage.

Every smart student knows that, for good memory retention and recall, timely and regular revision of past work is a must. Professor Art Kohn in a LearningSolutions article explained our propensities to forgetfulness:

How bad is the problem? How much do people forget? Research on the forgetting curve shows that within one hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information you presented. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information, and within a week, forgetting claims an average of 90 percent of it. Some people remember more or less, but in general, the situation is appalling,

Further exacerbating this problem is the ever-increasing wave of information overload. Smart students know all too well, the futility of trying to cram everything overnight to prepare for a brain memory-dump in the exam hall. Even though researchers are not in agreement, there is the certainty that we all tend to forget most of what we read the longer we put off revision.

Why memorize, when you can look up?

“Never memorize what you can look up in books” is a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, though what he actually said was somewhat different. He was asked, but did not know the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test. When this was pointed out, he said, he doesn’t carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.

Of course, if the story is true, that was Einstein and he had better and more complicated things to remember. He didn’t need to clutter his mind with things that could easily be looked up.

These days, most of what we read comes in digital formats — e-books, newsletters and more. There is much to be admired and gain from reading 52 books or more in a year. But at some point, reading, especially of the compulsive kind becomes counterproductive.

Daily relevant information and time wasting overdose of tid bits comes in digital formats. On the positive side, our digital devices equally come with apps that help us store, organize, and recall our readings.

These are the apps I use and I’m sure you will find one or two of them handy if you are not already into any of them.

1. OneNote. This is my primary notebook.
2. Zoho Notebook. This is a handy alternative to OneNote. I use this app to organize my writings and curate my web clippings.
3. Journey and Diaro are my online journaling and diary apps.
4. MultiNotes: Stick-up notes like app that organize entries into boards. I use this for saving disposable web clippings and personal writing notes and ideas.
5. E-notty: This is similar to Zoho Notebook as it enables organization of books writings or any recent idea into folders and sections.

By adding appropriate tags to your notes and web clippings, it is easier to search and quickly get hold of what you read several months or years ago.

Final Word

Don’t I want you to read, and read some more. Using all or some of these tools, you will be able to curate for future reference and recall and use most of what you have read or studied.

Disclosure: I am not in any affiliate marketing relationship with any of the authors or publishers mentioned here.

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