How to Read Faster at Work: Emails, Reports and Long Documents

To read faster at work, change what you read and how closely before you try to change how fast your eyes move. Triage every document by what it asks of you, skim reports by their structure before reading any section in full, handle email in a few planned batches instead of all day, and ask colleagues to put the main point first. Then read the parts that matter at your normal pace. A short daily practice habit can add a modest gain on top, but the large savings come from reading less of what does not need you.

Why reading at work takes so long

Much of a desk job is reading: messages, threads, reports, policies, proposals. A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that the average "interaction worker", whose job consists largely of communicating and coordinating, spent about 28 percent of the working week managing email and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or for colleagues who could help. Those figures are a decade-old estimate for one kind of job, but they make the point: a lot of working time goes on reading and searching, not only on reading speed.

Speed itself has a ceiling. The review of speed-reading research by Rayner and colleagues (2016) concludes that pushing well past your normal rate costs comprehension, and that eye movements account for only a small share of reading time. At work, a misread instruction or a missed clause costs more than the minutes saved. So the reliable gains are in selection: reading fewer words, in the right order, with a clear purpose.

Triage: decide how to read before you start

Before you open anything long, ask two questions: what does this want from me, and what happens if I miss a detail? The answers decide the reading mode.

The quickest document is the one you correctly decide not to read in full. Make that decision on purpose, in the first minute, rather than by drifting halfway through.

How to read emails faster

Most email time is lost to switching, not reading. Two field studies are worth knowing, because their results are more mixed than the usual productivity advice suggests:

• Kushlev and Dunn (2015) asked 124 adults to check email only three times a day for one week and as often as they liked in another. In the limited week, people reported lower daily stress.
• Mark and colleagues (2016) tracked 40 information workers for 12 working days with computer logging and heart-rate monitors. The more time people spent on email each day, the less productive they felt and the higher their measured stress. People who batched their email rated their productivity higher, but batching did not lower measured stress.

So batching is worth trying, without expecting miracles. In practice:

1. Set two to four email windows a day and turn off notifications between them, if your role allows it. Tell people how to reach you for anything urgent.
2. Read the newest message in a thread first. It often settles what the earlier ones were arguing about.
3. Read the subject and the first two lines, then decide: reply now if it takes under two minutes, schedule it, pass it on, or archive it. Touch each message once.
4. Search instead of re-reading. When you need a detail from an old thread, search for the name, number or keyword rather than scrolling and reading again.

How to skim a report in five minutes

Reports are built to be skimmed, even when nobody says so. Before reading any section in full:

1. Read the title, the executive summary and the date.
2. Read every heading to see how the argument is laid out.
3. Read the first sentence of each paragraph in the sections that look relevant.
4. Look at each chart and table and its caption: what is being compared, and how big is the difference?
5. Read the conclusions and recommendations.

Now decide which one or two sections you need to read properly, and read those at your normal pace. The difference between skimming for the gist and scanning for one fact is explained in skimming vs scanning.

Ask for the bottom line up front

You can only skim well if the writer puts the point where you will find it. The US Army made this a rule for its own correspondence: its regulation on writing (AR 25-50) says Army writing should be understood in a single rapid reading and requires the main point at the beginning, known as bottom line up front, or BLUF.

The idea works in any office. Put the request or conclusion in the subject line and first sentence of your own emails, and ask your team to do the same. A message that opens with "Decision needed by Friday: approve the revised budget" can be triaged in two seconds. If the people who write to you adopt it, your reading time drops without any change in your reading speed.

How to read long documents without losing the thread

• Plan passes. Skim the whole document first, then read the sections you need. A second, focused pass is usually faster than one slow, unfocused one.
• Work in blocks of 15 to 20 minutes with notifications off, and note one line per section as you go. The method is set out in how to focus while reading.
• Use a pacer for long, plain prose. Background reports and long narratives are where a steady pace keeps you moving. A paced reader is the wrong tool for tables, figures and anything you must check line by line; see how to speed read a PDF.

How short daily drills fit around work

If you want to practise, keep it small enough to survive a busy week. Ten minutes before your first email window works for many people:

1. 2 minutes: one or two 4×4 Schulte tables, to settle into a single task.
2. 1 minute: one 30-second text scan, finding every occurrence of a target word in a passage.
3. 7 minutes: read a work-related article in a paced reader at your normal speed plus 25 words per minute, and stop to summarise it in one sentence at the end.

Do this five days a week. Take the free reading speed test before you start and again after four weeks, comparing your effective speed, which accounts for comprehension. The full version of this routine is on How Tachi works.

Be realistic about what drills do. They train attention and visual search, and a fixed daily slot builds the habit of focused reading, but improvement on a drill does not carry over much to reading speed by itself. What moves reading speed over months is reading more and building vocabulary and background knowledge in your field. The evidence is in does speed reading work?, and how to read faster covers the methods that hold up.