Book training schedule

Almost all of our students on day one want to see the training schedule that will take them to their goal. Previously we used a partial list of exercises that complemented other resources. After long deliberation we decided to unite all exercises in one document as a plan. We tried to develop one exercise per skill, and still got many exercises.

Introduction

1. Take our course. We assume that you take our Udemy course. We also have a course in other languages and non-course options.
   Read our workbook
   
   Alternatively read our textbook
   
   Notice, in a couple of days you can get the book with serious discount time-limited check here.
   For additional clarifications, coupons and support feel free to ask on our Facebook group.
2. Watch all videos. If you are taking our Udemy course, it may be nice to watch all the videos one after another to get some overview of the material. Do not review TED talks or answer any quiz at this point.
3. Redo first section of the course. Watch again the first section of the course and do all the quizes of that section, watch all videos attached. From this point on, each time you meet a new subject, you should review the relevant section of the course. By the end of the training you are expected to get 100% completion on Udemy.
4. Define your goals and schedule. Write down your superlearning goals. How fast do you want to read and how well do you want to retain what you read? The qualifying baseline of 1000 words per minute 80% retention usually requires 10 weeks of intense training. The “six” as weeks below is more of a wishful thinking than actually measured result.
5. Decide how much you are going to practice per week. Probably you will get great results practicing 90 min per session, 4 days a week, but you can choose some other setup. You do need at least 3 hours of training per week. Please do not exercise more than 15 hours per week without consultation and weekly monitoring with Anna or Lev.
6. Getting extra-background. Go to our blog section and check the subjects. Read several posts. Try to search this keytostudy blog with different keywords to satisfy your curiosity. It is OK if you will not understand what you read now, some posts are useful later on in the course.
7. Understand what Pomodoro time means. Read this post. You are expected to take ~5 min rest for each ~15 min of training. Make sure your eyes get rest during that time. Other details appear on various posts of this blog.
8. Start training. By far the most addictive and simple exercise we can offer is visual short-term memory training. Train it daily for 15 min. At each stage of the course you will get another perspective on this exercise and will use a different strategy.

Week 1: Learning the basics

1. Take second and third sections of the Udemy course. Do take all quizes and watch extra materials. Try to enjoy the first week of training. You are expected to start working on visualization and memory, but first you need to get used to training your brain.
2. Proposed daily training:
   10 min relaxation visualization: visualize a nice and friendly environment. Try to imagine as many details as you can. Alternatively practice focus visualization.
   10 min create visual markers for abstract stuff
   15 min practice linking markers
   10 min learn more about yourself
3. Additional training games:
   Spot the difference games improve your concentration and focus. Another variation of the same game here.
   This simple and fun exercise will train you to be more accurate with markers.
   This fun game will train you to remember markers with many details.
   Standard memory games are also important.
   Some free style training here and here.
   No timing on these games. It is very important to have fun 🙂
4. Target: You will know you are ready to move on when you can create visual markers with ease and want to practice the skill on real things.

Week 2: Train visualization and memory

1. Take section seven of the Udemy course. Do take all quizes and watch extra materials. This is a bit advanced memory material, so if you get tired you can continue to next week’s material and go back afterwards… It is important to stay systematic and it is important to have fun, so calculate your own trade-off.
2. Proposed daily training:
   20 min daily improve your visualization
   20 min daily memorize remember images
   20 min daily memorize words
   These are good exercises. Anna urges to do them all the time. However, after week 2 the students are advised to practice these exercises only 5-10 min per day.
3. Additional training games:
   This game trains you to remember images using associations
   Habituate using markers for everyday memory items (meeting people,distractions, etc)
   Do practice when you travel
   Try to push your memory limits by multitasking computations
4. Target: You will know you are ready to move on when you can create visual markers with ease and for abstract ideas. Check out this article to see the level of complexity you will need to handle.

Week 3: Starting working with texts

1. Take section four of the Udemy course. Do take all quizes and watch extra materials. What you do next is read text paragraph by paragraph: preread, read and summarize from memory until you get almost 100% retention – like the retention you want your lawyer to have when representing you in court.
2. Proposed daily training:
   Spend a full hour daily to read texts paragraph-by-paragraph and remember as many details as you can.
   You can use reading with card.
   You need to remember all the numbers within the text without mistakes. You will need also to remember all the names without mistakes. And finally you will need to recite the content with great clarity. You can select words for initial visual markers and then gradually improve the quality of the visual markers.
3. Additional training ideas:
   Occasionally we suggest to annotate the text [no preference for annotation tools, as long as they allow free drawing] and draw your markers near the paragraphs. Do this for 2-3 days, but not afterwards
   You can start with wikipedia texts, but they are much more dense than what you encounter in real life. After 2-3 days of wikipedia reading, it is best to change to something simpler. Typically we suggest to read texts on reddit or come up with our own texts.
   For wikipedia texts you will need 1-2 marker per sentence, for regular text you will need 1-2 markers per paragraph.
   If you need a challenging text, try my old book or my other old book. They will challenge your attention to details and ability to remember large amounts of information.
4. Optional training
   Since it takes some time to get 100% retention (hint: more than a week), we add some attention improving games to increase our retention:
   This exercise assigns colours to text, making it easier to find differences. Later you can apply the same technique to the texts you read, like here.
   This exercise starts to prepare you for the things to come.
5. Target:
   You know that you are ready to move on when you remember 90% of the text you read without any mistakes. Use this tool to verify.

Week 4: Starting speedreading – subvocalization

1. Take section five of the Udemy course.
   We assume that at this point the student visualizes fast and almost effortlessly and can remember without errors 90% of what he/she reads using visual markers. Now it is time to speed things up.
2. Proposed daily training:
   If you do not do visual short-term memory training, you should start doing it.
   Also you should do camera mind game .
   20 min per day practice reading with subvocalization suppression. Please notice that when you suppress vocalization your retention percentage drops significantly and rises back gradually within the next 2 weeks.
   20 min per day scroll through text with high speed. At this point you can still control the speed with which you read.
3. Additional training ideas:
   It is a good time to check if you missed any game on Anna’s list
   And you should revisit the articles on recommended subjects.
   At this point your mental age should start changing, so have fun checking it.
4. Target:
   You are ready to move on when you sub-vocalize less than 10% of the text.

Week 5: Speedreading – saccades

1. Assumptions
   At this point you can read the text virtually without subvocalization.
   You should start working on saccades.
   Use this cheatsheet to verify the saccade size.
2. Proposed daily training:
   The main exercise here is sliding words display. It is a great exercise: simple and addictive. Do it as much as you can.
   Also you really should use Spreader software for your device. Other good alternatives are Acceleread and Reading Trainer.
   10 min per day try reading running text. You do not control the speed any more!
   10 min per day do visual angle training using speedreading Shultz tables.
   10 min per day train multicolumn saccades
3. Target:
   Start working from 3 columns to 1 column. Hint: it takes more than a week.
   You are ready to move on when when you text almost effortlessly.

Week 6:

1. Book reading.
   You measure how much time it takes to read a page from a chosen book, say X seconds.
   Now you read 5 pages x2 speed, 3 pages at x1.5 speed and 5 pages at x1.2 speed.
   Repeat the process for an hour. Do it daily for a week.
   Also read this article.
2. Everyday training
   Now you can start spicing up your training using simple exercises in everyday routine.
   You should also continue to monitor your reading speed and practice the relevant exercises until you reach 1000wpm with 85% comprehension. Usually it happens around week 10.
3. Some simple exercises you can do without a computer
   Do these exercises whenever you want.
4. Advanced memorization If you did not take section course of the course, please do.
   This exercise may help you with memory palaces.
   This exercise may help with podcasts and conversations.
   This exercise may help you with faces.
   This and this exercises may help you belong to the 2% of humanity that can multitask efficiently. [No promises here: you will need many additional skills]
5. Finish the course
   Do take the last two section of the course. If the course helped you please leave a review. If you leave a review your name will be included in our lottery and you will occasionally get cool stuff. Hint: Amazon books, 1:1 with Anna/Jonathan and free coupons for some of our other courses – if you are lucky.

And now the big question: what are you going to do next? May I suggest taking the advanced course, where you will be taught high-level visualization and linking technique, reading speed control and much more….