I don’t really like to worry about productivity too much. I’ve noticed that doing stuff I like the way I like is enough to get the most out of my time.

I recently ran into Spritz in Twitter and I remember hearing about it (or a similar tool) once before. As an idea it sounded kind of silly to me - just the kind of “productivity tool” to tinker with instead of actually getting stuff done.

Spritz is an application to make reading faster and more focused by showing just one word at a time. It allows one to read while focusing on a single spot and not having to move your eyes reduces distractions. The amount of words displayed in a minute can be adjusted.

Out of curiosity I followed the link and ended up on the site featuring a nice demo. Pressing the play button and watching the word flow past me truly was an odd experience. The speed (mere 250 words per minute) first felt super fast, then just fine and finally I was speeding things up. The text size and style was extremely pleasant and made reading – and understanding the text – easy.

Coming soon Spritz reading this very post. Now that’s meta!

I added the bookmarklet (called Spritzlet – true story) to my browser and have since been looking for excuses to read just about anything on the internet (still not Youtube comments though, that’s where I draw the line) to try my brand new superpowers.

Reading in Finnish is a bit trickier than in English due to words being longer by average which breaks them into parts that sometimes awkwardly break the flow, though I’m pretty sure that I’ll get used to it with some time.

TL;DR: try it. Let me know what you think.


By the way, my website seems to read just fine on Spritz. Does yours? That’s one reason more to get your semantics right in web development.