Speed Reading Is Nice…But

If you are in the software industry, you HAVE to read, read, and read; and it’s not only the “of course reading is essential”, it’s a matter of life and death…of your career!
And there is tons of material every day: books, blogs, news, articles,….etc., so how to manage? of course is Speed Reading.

Once you master it, yes…you will use it for every reading situation, and at this point, my dear reader, you start doing it wrong!
It is a tool like every tool we have; suitable for some scenarios, and not suitable for others! 
For example, it’s good for the following scenarios:

1. Unrelated topic: You are a web developer on the .net stack, and your feed reader brings you an article about 3D printing, cool stuff, but is it worth investing your time on? probably not
2. Filtering: You are looking for something, and you found too many articles in search results, so you filter them out and check which ones are worth thorough reading by speed reading
3. Extreme situation: someone pointed a gun on your head and ordered you to hack a bank system within 30 seconds and you are allowed to use Google… ok maybe less serious situations but you got the point

And sometimes you just need to read really really slow! every letter, every word, and every statement probably several times, you need to “absorb” the meaning, to think it over, to go deep with the details, to comprehend, cases like:

1. Applying: if you are going to use what you read to write code! never write a code after speed reading! you have to absolutely understand what your line of code is doing, and whether it is suitable for your case compared to the case of the article.
2. Judging: you want to buy a product, or want to know how to deal with someone/something/situation, you want to reply/comment on his article…etc. You need to have enough solid information in order to come to a conclusion on how to deal with it, you should NEVER judge or conclude on basis of speed reading.
3. Dealing with Sales/Marketing/Government/Agreements/Contracts: especially if it was an ad with extremely small text at the bottom that nukes the value of the ad up side down

conclusion: sometimes, you have to read slowly