After writing this, I realise you may need to speed read it!

My first company provided a speed reading training course for the best part of a day.

It wasn't the best targeted course for most people there. We mainly read legal and policy documents which by their nature are terse, and the method of speed reading taught traded-off retention against speed against accuracy. It was more of a concept, which you can go off with an develop yourself. So here's the idea -

1. Start with a text that is quite verbose but not overly so. A code specification or Brett Easton Ellis novel is a no. A light news article should be fine or non-technical book should be fine.

2. Recognise that when you read, you don't read a word from letter start to finish, you basically look in the middle of it and the word is recognised. If you have dyslexia, this technically probably doesn't work; but if you have dyslexia, you've probably invested countless painful hours to something a lot of us take for granted and hats off to that.

You might not notice, but you probably read multiple-words at a time already. Commonly paired words are often read together, like 'a few'. YMMV. Harness that.

3. Mentally split a page of text into narrow columns, perhaps the width of 2 medium length words. Flick your eyes across a line of text. Only focus on the middle of the mental column and absorb the words, like a snapshot (no need to blink).

This is where accuracy starts to degrade. If the text consists of obscure words or lots of figures, accuracy can hurt at the start. Grammar patterns are important too - as long as the text is written by a native or very close near native speaker, anticipation and auto-ordering in this mini-snapshot can be hard or impossible; likewise unfamiliar or complex sentence structures from a native speaker.

4. Now, start to speed up over a paragraph. This is where retention starts to hurt. You certainly don't want to be wording-out words, as this will slow you down and defeat the purpose. But when you've read a block of text, have you been able to follow the meaning at the end.

Again, using well written, non-overly terse training text is important.

5. You should be tired by now, having done this for several hours. Our trainer then suggested changing the 'snapshot' from one line, to two lines, so you're essentially reading the start of the second line before finishing the end of the first line. I can do this but your text needs to be super non-terse for this to work at the start, and even then it's weird. If you can cover a single line pretty fast in less than a second certainly, then this starts to become feasible.

tl;dr

Went on a training course. Was pessimistic as were my colleagues at the start. Persisted afterwards by trying a few minutes per day. Became a habit, especially when seeing articles or documents that I needed to read but didn't need to scrutinise. Important to choose the right tool for the right job. I'd not use this technique to read a document where I'm not familiar with the content-scope; I wouldn't use this technique to read a contract I'm signing, or where specifications/requirements are being very clearly outlined. I do use it to read things like bloomberg.com articles, or PMBOK Guide :)

Hope a little useful, and the above can set you on some kind of direction to learn more. I highly recommend a half-day instructor-led course to kick you off. I imagine there's a college near you which has something.