Agile is about being fast and flexible. I love reading books about AGILE and surrounding topics (motivation, management, happiness, nature,…) but always struggled reading a lot of text and having the need to condense relevant information afterwards. I guess you can apply the 80/20 rule too, assuming that you just need 20% of a book covering 80% of the relevant information.

I started creating my own summaries for books (find a detailed list at the end of this post) and learned how useful it is for a fast recap on key facts and to memorize a reading.

But it takes a considerable amount of time for summarizing (estimated at least the time reading the book, depending on the way of working with the book in the first reading session). Often I struggled to find the time to create the summaries resulting in a high loss of input (you can remember around 10% of something you read).

To learn speed reading is a great way to increase your reading efficiency by keeping a high effectiveness. But still it’s to much clutter and now I found a way to combine having less clutter and using speed reading.

For me a highlight is Blinkist (use this link if you would like to take me as a referral). It’s an awesome service offering high quality book summaries. I’m using it for roughly one month now and already finished reading 48 book summaries. 

I compared some of the so called Blinks to books I already fully read before and must admit it’s really a great quality of the provided summaries. You can see that it’s done by professionals. 
It takes you around 15-20′ to read one blink. I try to read 2 blinks a day and can fully convert my traveling time into a joyful reading experience. 
Sharing every finished READ in a tweet is a small motivator and maybe lets engage with other readers and likeminded.
It’s made for mobile devices (and desktops too) and works perfect with my Sony Xperia Z3 compact tablet (btw – what a device!!). I can mark important areas and with the premium version export my highlights to Evernote and use a Kindle for an even advanced reading experience. 

Next step to support better memorizing will be to extract Meta Summaries (Summaries of Summaries) and condense this knowledge in concrete next steps to actively use my acquired knowledge. Stay tuned on the outcome 😉

My list of book summaries

Maybe it’s helpful for you too, to use some of my summaries (not at all in that high quality that the Blinks are providing, but written with passion too 😉

What do you recommend for efficient reading and memorizing? Please share your thought and drop a comment.