I made a video about my method for reading a book every 10 days. At least it’s my method, and it works, so I’m going to explain it to you.
First of all, I would like to start with a little side note. When I talk about this method, or the fact that I’ve now read 37 books in 2019. I receive quite a few critiques. On two levels.
The first is that reading should be for pleasure and not a challenge. I challenge myself to read because it was something that I haven’t done up until now. And I wanted to find pleasure in reading. So I created this challenge, which to start with was a book every month, then a book every 20 days and now it’s a book every 10 days. This challenge created a pleasure in reading for me.
The second is that I often hear is “Yes but if you read a book every 10 days it’s quantity not quality.” I think that’s false. When I see the number of books that there are out there, we could read a book every day we would still find quality. It’s not because we read more books that we must lower the quality. I loved every 37 of the books I read this year. Of course, I have a little experience in reading. So now I have an incredible book-list and I go from recommendation to recommendation.
Let’s go back now to my method.
1/ Defines a goal that is achievable
If, at the moment, you read five or six books a year don’t try and start the challenge with 30. It’s a bit like in sport, you’ll hurt yourself. So how many books have you read this year ? If it’s less than 5, you could go up to a book a month, for example. That will be 12 which is already an achievable goal. And if you read 12 you could maybe go up to 24, etc. In the same sense, if a goal is set too high, it will be deceptive and the volume that you want to read will be too much for a week, that’s not good.
2/ Defines a unit of measurement “a book”
Is it 800 pages ? 100 pages ? Because reading an 800-pages book every 10 days or reading 100-pages book every 10 days isn’t the same thing. I decided for myself that a book was around 500 pages. So if I chose a small book, for example 200 pages, I had to read two in the same time that I’d originally given myself. In the same sense, 500 pages can vary. It can be 400 or 300. So fix yourself an achievable goal. For example, saying “12 books of 200 pages in a year” is something achievable. Rather than saying “OK I’m going to read 12 books but it doesn’t matter which books” and then saying, “Oh I would like to read Homo Sapiens (800 pages)” Which happened to me. And I can tell you that that’s a lot of reading for 10 days.
3/ Break the goal down into small steps
If you want to read a book every 10 days, and you’ve defined that a book is 300 pages long. That means that you have 30 pages to read per day. I’ve tried quite a few things. I tried saying to myself, “OK, I’ll try doing what I can during the week and catch up during the weekend.” That doesn’t work. Because generally you have other things to do over the weekend and the volume of pages to catch up with is too much. I struggle to read for more than an hour, an hour and a half. It’s complicated. I prefer reading in small doses of half an hour. I have a Kindle, and the benefit of a Kindle is that you can see your % of reading. So if you start a book, and you’re at 0% you know that you have to be at 10% by the end of the day. What worked for me was to read 5% in the morning and 5% in the evening. To force myself to have at least my 5% in the morning. During the weekend, you’ll be able to catch up a bit. If you skipped one of your 5% in the evening, then you can catch up on Saturday. On the other hand, if you miss out on 5 evenings, you’ll find reaching your goal gets harder and harder and you’ll have difficulty in achieving it. Once again, the goal to begin with : start off small so as to be sure to achieve what you want.
A few other things. It’s great to be one book ahead, so that as soon as you finish a book, you can start another. A few times I wanted to read a book every 10 days and it took me 3 or 4 days to start my next book. So then, of course, I only had 6 days to finish the book so it’s started to get complicated. I also decided to alternate between self-help and business books to fiction so as to vary. So there we have it, that’s my method. It’s really easy, but it’s so easy that often people aren’t really able to do it.
My reading list is available in my instagram stories > HERE
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