Increasing your reading speed is an effective way of boosting productivity. It will also allow you more time to read for pleasure, even if your daily schedule is booked and hectic. While practice does marginally increase reading speed, habits picked up as children stay with us throughout life and prevent any significant progress toward improving our speed or comprehension as adults. Conscious efforts to break these habits are the secret to making real strides in your reading pace. At first, comprehension suffers a bit, but with the consistent practice of new methods, comprehension levels quickly rise again, usually in a matter of a few weeks.
One of the predominant detrimental habits acquired while learning to read, and one of the most difficult to break, is known as vocalization. Stemming from encouragement to sound out words as we learn to read, vocalization is saying the words we read. Typically, they are spoken in our head, but some people mouth the words or even pronounce them quietly. This constrains the maximum rate at which we read to the much slower speed of speech. Start forcing yourself to read without vocalizing the words, and keep at it. Eventually, the habit falls away, and you will naturally read at an increased speed.
Many people have a tendency to re-read text. Known as regressing, going back over sentences, phrases, or just a word or two wastes significant time while reading. While sometimes this is necessary for reading comprehension, often it happens simply out of habit. Stay alert and catch yourself regressing. With continuous conscious effort to prevent it, you will eventually stop doing it, getting through text much faster.
Be aware of how quickly your eyes move to the beginning of the next line once you reach the end of a line of text. In general, the eyes return slowly. Pay attention to making quick, sweeping eye movements to continue reading. This moves you through your reading material faster, and it prevents the natural, extra reading of words as you make the return.
Start widening the span of text your eyes take in as you read. People read word by word, but can learn to see and process chunks of text instead. Focus on sentence fragments rather than individual words, using punctuation as built-in guides. You begin to naturally read in thought blocks, bounding across lines of text at much greater speed. This process is aided by recognizing words as opposed to reading them. Rather than reading words, focus on their individual appearances formed by their unique combination of letters. This also helps cut down on vocalization.
Breaking these well-ingrained habits is the key to boosting your reading speed and productivity. Do not expect it to be easy, as these habits have been with you since you first learned to read. They will not go away overnight. These habits also are not black and white; you do not either do them or not do them, but you do them to varying degrees and with varying frequency. While that may sound frustrating, it means there is always potential to read even faster with more practice of speed reading techniques.