A Technique to Ensure Reading Completion

One of the challenges that I have is starting many books and not finishing them. I realized that there are so many books in my Amazon and Google Books library yet many of them have 5-10% completion only. I’m sure I’m not the only one having this problem. The good news is that I think I finally found a way that works for me to help with book completion.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I did “disappear” from this blog for about 2 weeks or so. In that time I actually completed the book called “Leaders Eat Last“. That is because I was trying a new technique, well new to me at least.

I know that as humans we take in information in various forms, those are mostly visual, auditory and kinaesthetics (I won’t go to auditory digital in this post). Of course, unless I use braille I can’t really read books using kinesthetics method. That left me with two methods that are visual and auditory. Therefore I wondered what happens if I use both at the same time.

This dawned on me because I started to notice that the reason I stopped reading halfway is that of eye fatigue and visual distractions. At the same time, I can’t really rely on audio only as English is not my native language so sometimes I can miss things or misunderstand. This is why I started experimenting using both channels.

I used Google Books for this book and I enable the dictation while reading the book at the same time. The result was astounding, I think I actually took much more from the book and this is probably the first time I completed a book in 2 weeks only. While reading, even if my eyes got tired, I still listen to the audio and my brain still takes in information. Those text to speech engines really improved these days by the way, both my Android and iOS devices read them properly.

In a nutshell, if you are one of those people who have difficulty finishing a book like myself, give the double input technique a go. Read while listening really works for me. It can be a bit taxing at a time but it does help with concentration.