You have got to admit, webpages are designed to distract you as much as possible.
It is impossible to complete an entire paragraph without clicking on another distracting link which is usually posts like ’10 Things you did not know about Coffee’ or ‘Kim Kardashian posts revealing selfie’. For people easily distracted like me, it is a struggle to read online content let alone absorb it for future use.
Fortunately Evernote Clearly and Spreed are two handy Chrome extensions to help you out.
Without them I would never get any online reading done. While Evernote Clearly is an extension of the Evernote Family and provides a distraction free reading environment, you can also send the article to your Evernote account and read it later perhaps while commuting. Last week at Vulcan Post, we talked about an app which can let us finish a novel under 80 minutes. Although that seems a little too much, Spreed helps me to speed read through my articles and finally I can finish a single article.
For example, this morning, I decided to read a Wired magazine article on the missing Malaysian Airlines flight. Even though Wired is no way as distracting as say, DailyMail, it has enough links on the side to destroy my focus.
Well, that looked pretty distracting until I clicked on the Tablelamp looking Evernote Clearly button on my Chrome and I ended up with a distraction free, white on dark gray background.
This is certainly an improvement over the original website. Note that from this page, you can clip this entire article to your Evernote account. Nevertheless, to speedread this, I highlighted a certain portion (you can select all if you want) and on the right click, a Spreed option comes up.
The beauty of this Chrome extension is how seamlessly integrated it is. Now you can race through your selected text and whichever speed you want. I have found that 300 wpm is a pretty decent speed for reading webpages where without these tools we read slower than a regular book. Anything above 400 wpm, needs a lot of attention and you need to be distraction free as possible. It is recommended to start at 300 and slowly build your speed up. End of the day, you will finish the article you were struggling to read.
Also read: [Amazing] With Spritz, we may soon finish full novels in under 80 minutes
