What spritz is, is it's a speed reading technique that allows you to quickly go through large volumes of content and it leverages focus. And so what I mean by that is that it actually compiles an entire book or blog post and then it shows all of the words in a sequential form in the same exact spot on the screen. And so in this guide, we're going to walk through exactly why I use this as a tool to see if it's something that you might find helpful.

I started doing this primarily when I was getting into my Ph.D. research because the sheer amount of content I had to go through was very large and I will show you right here my reading list simply to research a single paper was sixty-three publications.

And some of these were entire books and they are definitely things that would take a long time to read if I simply went word by word and read in a traditional manner but I actually had to go through this amount of content typically in a few weeks, and so I knew I had to have a better solution. And that's when I started researching some of the best speed reading techniques that are out there.

Many of them did not work out very well for me, but the spritz technique was one that actually was effective and so that's why I wanted to share it with you. So if you go to spritzlet.com this allows you to add this little bookmark bar here.

And so you can simply add it follow the instructions here. Just like it's showing you in the little animation. And what this is going to allow you to do is any page that you go on. You are going to be able to have the spritz technique implemented.

So I'm going to show you right here. This is a Python programming book and it is a decently long or this chapter is decently long. And so this might take a few minutes to go through. If I come and press on the little spritzlet bookmark bar you can see what it is doing.

This is exactly what I was explaining at the very beginning, the way that spritz works is instead of having your eyes move from left to right. So if you were to read this content you would say "How do we compose a complex string?" and you'd go all the way down and one of the more challenging kinds of skills to learn is to remain focused when you're reading and it can be very hard. I'm not sure about yourself but if I am reading content like a book or article it's very easy for my mind to wander to get distracted, sometimes I'll read the same exact paragraph or sentence a few times until I'm actually paying attention.

What I discovered with the spritzlet technique is that it completely removes any of the distractions because this is moving so fast I'm really forced to focus specifically on the words as they're going across and I have it right now at four hundred and ninety-five words per minute. When I started I was much less I started around 150 words per minute just to start to get used to this kind of focus because this is a completely different way of reading content and then I moved to 200 than 250 words.

Now I'm close to 500 words per minute which allows me to go through this kind of content in a very short period of time. So that is how you can use the little spritzlet bar. Now if you have a large amount of content that isn't in web form. So for example, if you want a PDF and this is something that I had to do quite a bit with my research for my Ph.D. is most of the content that I showed you so everything that I have here all of these published works 100 percent of these are in PDF.

So the spritzlet bar does not work on PDF documents even when you open them in the browser. And so what they recommend is to use this tool called Readsy and what you can do with this is you can come here and it's free to use and click on the file that you want to upload. And so I'm going to pick this one out right here. Press upload it will go through the PDF document. Convert it into just a stack of words and then you can perform the exact same task.

So you can see right here

It has uploaded one of the published works that I'm going through I have it set at five hundred words per minute and if I click on ready then it will go through and it performs the exact same task.

And so if you were to come and see me when I am researching some of those published works you would find me right here staring directly at this line. So staring at this vertical bar for minutes on end going through each one of these items and this is something that if you've never tried it before it may seem very weird or it may seem like something that simply wouldn't work.

And so what my advice to you would be is to simply try it, go and add the spritzlets bar to your browser and then say go to a Wikipedia page and make it be a topic that is something that you have some kind of understanding with so that you know what is going to be reviewed and then go through and go through the entire article.

And I think you'll be shocked by how much you retain and it's because this may seem like a very different way of reading content but because it changes your entire focus because you are now completely zoned in on all of these words that are flowing through right here. You actually are paying even more attention than you typically would if you were reading in a traditional manner from left to right and all the way down.

And so what my approach usually is, is I use the spritz technique the first time that I'm going through a large piece of content and if it's something technical or something mathematical that has formulae then obviously I have to go back and go through those formulae and then I have gone through it twice but it's much faster by doing it that way and I get a very good idea for the high-level concept of what is being discussed and then I can go back and review it again and then I have mastered that specific article.

So in review, that is the spritz reading technique. I hope that you find it helpful and that it helps you in your development learning journey.

Resources

• Spritzlet
• Readsy