Speed Reading With ADHD: How to Stay on the Page

If you have ADHD and reading loses you, change how the words arrive. A page of slow text leaves your attention room to wander. One word at a time, at a pace that needs all of you, leaves none. Redline shows a single word with a red focal letter, keeps the words coming, and ends every read with a quiz that shows what you kept.

Why does reading lose you?

Start with the page itself. A printed page is four hundred words sitting still. Nothing on it moves. Nothing asks for you. Your eyes can be on line twelve while you are somewhere else, and the page will not notice.

Then add the pace. Most people read near the speed of speech, 150 words a minute, because they say each word in their head. That is slow next to how fast you think. The gap between the two is free time, and a restless mind fills free time.

So you drift, come back, and find you have read a paragraph without taking in a word. You go back to the top. It happens again. After three rounds you put the book down and decide you are bad at reading.

You are not bad at reading. You were handed a slow, still thing and asked to stay with it.

What changes when words come one at a time?

Three things, all at once.

There is one thing to look at. Not a page, not a line. One word, in one spot, with one red letter to rest your eyes on. There is nowhere else on the screen for attention to go.

The words keep coming. You are not pulling yourself through the text. It is arriving. Miss a moment and the sentence stops making sense, and you notice straight away. That fast feedback is what a still page never gives you.

The pace can match your mind. Set it a little faster than comfortable and reading stops being something to sit through. It becomes something to keep up with.

What pace should you start at?

Faster than you think. This is the part that surprises people.

1. Take the reading speed test to find your number.
2. Set Redline 50 to 100 words a minute above it.
3. Read for ten minutes. One chapter, one article, one anything.
4. Take the quiz.

If the pace is too slow you will drift, the same as on a page. If it is right, you will reach the end and realise you were there for all of it. To feel the difference first, try the 400 wpm test. It takes under a minute.

The baseline is 150 words a minute. 300 is 2×. Redline trains toward 750, which is 5×, in steps of 25 with a quiz at each one.

What does the quiz do for focus?

It gives the read a finish line. A page has no end state. You can drift through it and never be told. A quiz changes that. In a few minutes you are going to be asked, and part of you stays alert because of it.

It also tells you the truth afterward. A miss shows you where you left. That is more useful than the vague sense that you were not really reading.

And it turns reading into something with a score. Redline counts streaks, levels and a weekly league. Ten minutes becomes a round you can win, and a streak is a reason to open the app tomorrow.

How do you keep it going?

Make it small and make it daily.

• Ten minutes. Set a timer. Stop when it ends.
• Same time each day, tied to something you already do, like coffee.
• Read what you want. A novel counts. An article counts. A podcast turned into text counts.
• Protect the streak, not the page count.

There is a ready-made schedule in the 30-day reading plan, and more on staying on the page in how to focus while reading.

A straight word about what this is

Redline is a reading app. It is not a health product, and nothing here is medical advice. What we can say is plain: one word at a time at a brisk pace is a different experience from a still page, it costs nothing to try, and the quiz at the end will tell you in ten minutes whether it works for you.

Take the test. Set the pace high. Read for ten minutes and see what you kept.