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In 1993 I was coaching people to make better use of their time. I asked a number of volunteers to track their time. They had forms marked out in either 20 or 30 minute intervals. There turned out to be three major areas where time seemed to disappear: travel, meetings and reading.

For travel, we had people take motivational and informational audio tapes in the car and plane, and have a book or notebook for ideas while waiting. We looked into running effective meetings and made that time more productive. Then it was time to take care of reading. This was not as easy.

I looked into a speed reading course, but it was really only for casual reading, like light novels. What my clients needed was a way to absorb technical material and be able to recall it.

I invested nearly 6 months into research, trial and error and best guesses. I put together some trial groups and tracked their progress. It was working. One thing I had heard years before was that it would be helpful to read words in groups. I tried to do this but the decision as to how much text to grab was too distracting. It reduced the ability to read instead of enhance it.

The breakthrough was in figuring out how to break sentences apart ahead of time and reading words in groups. Eventually the Eye-Hop exercises were born and a Perl programme was developed to separate the word groups automatically. Once people were at speed in reading groups of 5 to 7 words, they could jump to swivelling down the page with their eyes and processing large groups of words quickly. By adding in some organisational tools and strategies, a viable answer to defeating the ‘sub-vocalisation barrier’ was achieved. That barrier is being able to read faster than one can talk in one’s head.

A couple of years into the programme it was determined that it would be an advantage to be able to remember some things more long term. We worked out a memory system that greatly enhances recall. It’s a lot of fun, stress free and works brilliantly. It is based on the concept of the roman room.

Along the way I’ve been able to use new technologies, and have incorporated them into the programme whenever appropriate. An example would be the little wheel on the mouse. When they first came on the market I acquired both a Microsoft and Logitech model to test them out. I sent the results to my graduates and encouraged them to get one, as they make flying down the page easier than using Page Down.

Along the way I’ve incorporated the latest research on good ergonomics and eye health, including how to alter your background colours to avoid eye strain.

The result is a system which allows people to greatly improve their reading abilities over a 5 to 8 period, spending about 40 minutes a day on the eye exercises. Through the use of a special web site, any electronic text can be converted into the eye exercises. People can progress as quickly through the programme as they like with the strategic information, and can progress through the exercises as quickly as they have time to apply them. The more time they put into it the faster they will progress. In every course, whoever does the most of those eye exercises sees the greatest percentage increase in their reading scores.