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….