In addition to the new company name, I am also taking the faster reading program I have developed over the past 18 years and offering it as a public workshop. Rev It Up Reading is designed as a half-day workshop and will be offered this spring in Boston, Hartford, NYC and Atlanta. You can download the brochure here.

I will be continuing to send out my tip-of-the-month and will now include other tips in many personal and professional areas such as work-life balance, email, time and stress management, and more.

Thank you for your continued support of me and my endeavors! I appreciate your patience and understanding in this fun time of transition.

Abby

Highlighting while reading is meant to help you focus on the important information. Once you have located it, you color over it with your preferred colored highlighting pen (mine is yellow) so you can quickly find that information again later on. There are a few problems with this:

1. Highlighting too frequently. Some highlight everything they read including their daily newspaper and favorite magazine. If you don't think you will ever refer back to it, then why spend your time?!
2. Highlighting too much. If you are highlighting more than 25% on a page, it means you have little familiarity with the material. To really learn material, you need to write it down using your own words in a studiable format.
3. Getting distracted by your highlights. Imagine you find a paragraph with 10 lines that looks important. You highlight each individual line. Then you realize there are some color gaps between the lines so you color them in. THEN you notice the lines on the edges are ragged so you make a nice neat box around it. Finally, you can move on with your reading IF you remember what you were reading in the first place!
4. Postponing learning and wasting your time. A month or two later, you go back to the material and see those 10 lines neatly highlighted but you have no idea why you highlighted it!

So what's the best way to use a highlighter effectively? Whether you are going to school, read for business or for pleasure, highlighting is a good thing if you follow these four suggestions:

1. Highlight only key words and phrases. Never highlight a whole sentence or paragraph unless it is an important quote.
2. Highlight only the material you plan on referring to again.
3. Highlight 25% or less of every page, or use a different note taking technique.
4. Create a good filing system to find your highlighted info again.

And for those of you who are students, I suggest you never buy a used textbook that has already been highlighted. After all, how do you know if what they highlighted is really important to you?!