First impressions, mind reading, snap decisions and thin slicing.

Those are strong concepts, some of them even mind boggling. But these are the very concepts that Blink, the book by Malcolm Gladwell is all about. This book will help you think about the way you think, especially in the first two seconds of meeting someone or seeing something. The two seconds where our unconscious takes over and let’s us think without thinking.

First impressions

The book has many examples about first impressions. About instinctively knowing whether a statue is a forgery or whether a service at tennis ends up as a double fault. These are examples from real life where experts knew instinctively what the right answer was in a blink. But not only experts do this, we all do this all the time. The first two seconds we look at something or at someone are the two most decisive seconds we can imagine. It’s hard to grasp, but most of the information we use to make decisions are packed into those two seconds.

Thin slicing is the concept behind the 2 seconds. In those two seconds we observe a lot, but our unconscious picks out only a small amount of decisive information. But as it is our unconscious doing this, we don’t consciously know what those critical pieces of information are. It’s something we learned to feel intuitively or instinctively. Blink takes a look at studies that have been conducted about what those thin slices are in particular situations.

One of the studies I really liked was a study about facial expressions. In this particular study the movements of the face were broken down into the smallest bits of muscle contraction (action units). Every movement was identified and facial expressions where tagged with these action units. By methodologically eliminating action units from an expression and asking lots of people to interpret it, the decisive action units where determined. They thin sliced the human face (although that sounds gruesome…). Nice fact: the results of this research have been used to create realistic facial expressions in animated movies.

Click to continue »

About two weeks ago, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits released an e-book on his concept of Zen to Done. ZTD is a series of habit changes associated with productivity systems. Combined they form a productivity system by itself. At only $9.50 the 83 page book is a steal!

Productivity systems are a series of habit changes
Leo states in this e-book that adopting a productivity system is in fact a series of habit changes. Usually this is true, you have a couple of habits that are not compliant to sticking to the system, and you have those habits for many years already. The system won’t change them, you have to.

If you fail to change the habits, the system won’t work and you’ll get disappointed. Yet another system that looked promising and doesn’t deliver. Back to square 1. I should know, I’ve been there (and it sucks!).

One habit at a time
Leo advocates to change only one habit at a time, using habit changing techniques. Changing multiple habits at the same time can be done, but takes a lot of determination and energy. I tried it when I started with GTD, and subsequently did not manage to keep up with all the aspects of the system.

I have experienced first hand that this is the best way to change habits. So I did try to change all my habits at the same time when implementing GTD…and failed. After a month or two, I noticed that I picked up one habit of the system though: Keeping my inboxes empty. And I was getting pretty solid at this too! One habit changed, and other habits followed. One at a time.

Zen to Done: changing habits to be productive
Zen to Done, how is it different from GTD? Well GTD focuses mostly on the system for productivity and ZTD focuses more on the habits needed to sustain that system. There are more differences, but this is the most notable in my opinion. Click to continue »

Gtdfrk is a frequent commenter on this blog, a fellow Dutchie (I think) and a blogger that produces very useful content and resources. He’s celebrating that he has reached a 1000 subscribers on his blog (I’m one of them) and wants to go to the next level. So he started an experiment and hands out cash to other bloggers to review him.

I have to say, the cash is going to be a nice bonus, but the resources gtdfrk is presenting on his blog Getting Things Done and with his accompanying resource list The Ultimate GTD Index are excellent. His approach is more strict GTD than you’ll find here, but I suspect he’s broadening his perspective.

The site design of Getting Things Done has changed over the last couple of months. Gtdfrk has integrated his ultimate GTD index and his blog into one portal. He also added a tumblelog and a “Post Index” to the site as well.

The post index has all the posts conveniently categorized by topic. This way it’s easy to scroll through the posts and decide upon the next read. There are articles for beginners in GTD, lessons learned and for enhancing your system.

The ultimate GTD index is a great starting point for GTD users. It has the 5 most recent posts of 57 blogs about GTD, a softwarelist for both offline and online solutions and more. The major downfall of the index is that it doesn’t list my blog

There’s room for improvement on the tumble log and it can be a lot more valuable than it is right now. I see tumble logs as a reference to good reads elsewhere, but there are about 50% links back to the blog.

The about page is a bit short, so we’re not really getting a grip on who gtdfrk really is and why he’s blogging. My experiences with gtdfrk so far tell me that he speaks dutch (I know that through MyBlogLog), he’s an early riser (comments on this site) and he’s got a family (comments again).

Pay Getting Things Done a visit and if you like what you see, subscribe to his feed.

It’s been over five years since I first read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Three weeks ago on holiday, I re-read it for the fifth time, and I plan to re-read it every year for a long time to come. This little book about a shepherd traveling to Egypt to find his treasure is so full of wisdom that I learn something every time.

If you read my bio you know that I have been idling along in life for a long time. I didn’t know what I wanted with my life, I didn’t know what to do for education or work, and I didn’t even know who I really was. But these questions were on my mind, and by thinking them over you position yourself to be ready for answers. An old Chinese proverb says “When the student is ready, a teacher will appear.” The Alchemist, or Paulo Coelho if you will, has been a teacher for me.

Here are seven lessons, illustrated with quotes from The Alchemist, that have the power to change your life for the better. Click to continue »

Spreeder.com is a very cool tool for speed reading text online. In this article I’ll be discussing all the neat little features that are in the tool, that make it rock!

The basics

When you first start spreeder, you get a basic input screen for text. There’s no limit to the number of words you can paste in there. I tried up to 100k words, and although the app slows down a little, it works fine. You get the text in the box, either by copy-paste, or by
using the spreed! bookmarklet (which is even easier and eliminates the copy-paste action).

The settings

In the righthand corner on the bottom, you can find the link to the settings. The default is shown in the screenshot. The settings are:

• words per minute
  the effective speed with which spreeder will show you words
• chunk size (words)
  the number of words spreeder will show you at the same time
• window width (px)
  width in pixels
• window height (px)
  height in pixels
• font size
  again in pixels
• font / background color
  70 colors to choose from
• alignment
  center, justify, left

The alignment option “justify” can give strange results in some cases as you can see in the screenshot.

The words per minute and chunk size settings are the most interesting options, and the combination determines the “flash” time. In the table you can find the flash time in seconds for different speeds and chunk sizes. I suggest you keep inside the white area, the
orange areas are tricky as you’ll probably lose some effectivity, the red area is very challenging and the chances of effective speed reading are very slim.

Advanced settings

Quite hidden in the left bottom corner of the settings section, you can find the advanced settings. They are:

• Speed variability
  This setting takes the length of words into account. Short sections get less time, long sections get some more time.
• Start new chunk at end of sentences and paragraphs. This setting ends chunks at periods. This gives a more logical chunk size, and helps comprehension.
• Slight pause at end of sentences and paragraphs. This setting adds a little pause here and there. The pauses are so small that you hardly notice them at all.
• Skip over “stopwords” which convey no additional meaning to the sentence (i.e. “the”, “an”, etc) This strips the text of words and reduces it to words with essential meaning. This obviously only works for english.

The speed variability is very useful and helps simulate a more natural reading behavior. The other options can be used as you like them, they are more of a personal preference.

Some hacks for the window size

You can play around with the window size to suit your needs. As you increase the chunk size, you’ll want to adjust the size of the window as well.

You can set the window like a single line with every word next to each other, to resemble written text as you are used to it. This is helpful in training for speed reading text outside of spreeder as well. Use the following formulas for the settings:

• window width = monitor resolution - 300 pixels
• window height = font size * 2

You can also choose to have a single column with every word beneath each other. This is a setting that gives a good view of all the words in one glance for chunk sizes up to 6. Use the following settings:

• window width = 10
• window height = 300 (this will keep all controls “above the fold” for most resolutions)

My personal setup

At the moment I use 500 wpm @ chunk size 3 in a 700 x 40 window with centered alignment and a 20 px font. I use both speed variability and new chunks at new sentences. This is a comfortable speed for me, and results in a good comprehension for me. The next step will be moving to a bigger chunk size.

Summary

Spreeder.com is a very cool app that’s very useful for speed reading text online. It can be setup to suit personal preferences and is a great tool for getting your reading productivity up a notch. Speed reading offline requires an additional set of skills to get through the pages of a book, and still recognize all the words. They aren’t as neatly isolated then as they are in spreeder. So while it can also be used to train speed reading skills for offline reading, by design it’s most suited as a productivity tool. And in that field it does a very good job!

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