Using Estimated Reading Time as a Productivity Enhancer
You can read this article in two minutes and fourteen seconds.
Now, for an article like this, you probably don't need an estimated reading time. Most TechWell articles are short enough to read in just a few minutes. But for longer reading material, whether in print or online, it can be a time saver to know in advance how long it will take to read.
Think about it: In so many other activities, you know “how long” before you start. When you're planning a trip, your GPS or smartphone app will tell you how long it'll take. When you watch a movie or video, you typically know how long it is. When you watch a TED talk, you know before you start if it's one of the eighteen- to twenty-minute talks or one that's a mere six minutes or less. When I go hiking, the hike leaders post the duration of each scheduled hike. In so many of our activities, we know before we start how long they'll take. So why not reading?
Some people already provide an estimated reading time in their online posts, but most don’t. If you want to incorporate estimated reading times into your own writing, you could use some fancy code to calculate the reading time. Or just drop the text into this read-o-meter to get an estimate. That's what I did for this article. You could also just read it yourself to see how long it takes you, then add a “fudge factor” because readers won't be familiar with it the way you are.
Of course, any estimate you provide assumes readers read the material start to finish, without clicking on any embedded links, such as those in this article. Clicking on a link could spell the start of a side trip of long (or endless) duration, in which case all bets about reading time are off.
In general, if you want people to read your material, it's a good idea to divide it into chunks and to keep each chunk as short as possible. In fact, consider aiming for six-minute chunks. Almost everyone can spare six minutes, as long as they don’t have to do it ten times an hour.
It might also be a good idea to provide an estimate that’s a little on the high side. There’s something about seeing a time estimate that makes people wonder if they can beat it. By specifying a reading time that’s a bit longer than you think it will take, many readers will finish faster and pat themselves on the back. Accordingly, such time estimates might encourage people to read material they might otherwise ignore (not that that applies to this article, of course).
