Reading books is one of life’s great rewards, but in today’s increasingly distractible environment, it can be challenging to find time for books. In this read-more-books series, I’ll share the tips and tricks I use to read at least 50 books a year without feeling like I’m reading that much at all.
Tip #5: If you want to read more books in 2020, set a goal for yourself. Write it down. Better yet, create a Reading Challenge for yourself in Goodreads so you’ll always know where you stand during the year.
But goals by themselves are worthless unless you have a system of follow through. A goal sets direction and represents an event, a point in time, whereas a system is the means to achieve that goal. A goal is what; the system is how. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits: “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”
For example, a goal might be winning a championship as a professional basketball player. The system would be the daily practices, workouts and diet needed to achieve that goal. Since most people share the same kind of goals, but only a few achieve them, I believe it’s the systems people employ that create success, not just having the goal.
So, let’s say you set a goal to read 50 books in 2020.
A 300-page book takes about 6 hours of reading time for the average adult reader. 50 books equals 300 hours of reading. 300 hours per year is 49 minutes each day. Rounding up to 60 minutes of reading a day would help give you a cushion for those inevitable days when life gets I the way.
If the goal is reading 50 books in a year, can you devise a system that enables you squeeze in an hour of reading every day? Your daily reading practice?
While you could decide to save your reading for long stretches on the weekend, or sit down every day and read for 60 minutes straight, you might choose instead to break it up into shorter “micro” sessions: listen to an audiobook during your daily commute, read for a few minutes during the inevitable dead spaces of your day, and read for a half-hour before you go to sleep. Your reading goal won’t feel out of reach once you break it down into bite-sized daily activities.
How many books do you want to read in 2020? What reading activities could you design as your system to make sure you meet your goal?
Happy reading!