Today marks the one year anniversary of one of the plans I had for 2024: read more books.

My reading streak for 2024

By the end of 2023, I realized I had completely lost my ability to focus on a long piece of text. I could read articles & blog posts with some effort, but multi-day reading adventures (like reading, and finishing a book) were simply not happening.

Looking at my stats for 2023, I had read (as in “finished”) a total of 3 books. Three. In a whole year. That was not good.

The Plan

One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that focusing on outcomes is not a good long-term strategy for me. I need to focus on the process, on the journey, on the doing.

Thus, I set up a simple plan for 2024: read at least 5 minutes every day.

That’s it. No goals, no targets, no “I want to read 50 books this year”. Just read for 5 minutes, every day.

I would use the Books app to keep track of my progress with the “Reading Goals” feature (you can set a custom target for both daily minutes, and total books in a year). Books can sync your progress across devices, so I could read on my iPad, my iPhone, or my Mac.

(What about non-digital books? I’ll get to that later in the Hacks section.)

The other rules were simple:

  • No distractions or breaks. As the old Buddhist saying goes, “when reading, read”.
  • No skipping books. If I started a book, I had to finish it.
  • No skipping days. Whatever happens, read for 5 minutes.

(Of course, life happens, and I did skip a few days here and there. But I’ll share a hack for that later.)

The Results

According to Books, I’ve read a total of 32 books in 2024. That’s 10x more than the previous year.

Soon after I started, I realized that 5 minutes was a great starting point, but I increased that number a bit every week. I’ve settled on 15 minutes as a good balance between “I can do this every day” and “I’m never going to finish this boring tome at this pace”. Of course, some days I read for 30 minutes, or an hour, or more. But the important thing is that I read every day.

When I share this with friends, they usually ask “how do you find the time?”.

The answer is simple: small things compound over time. 15 minutes a day is nothing, specially if you combine it with another activity (I’m a big fan of reading while riding my indoor bike trainer: getting stronger and wiser feels like cheating at life).

15 minutes a day, every day, for a year, is 91 hours. That’s almost 4 days of reading. And that’s just the minimum.

Conclusions

Reading more books is not really about reading more books. It’s about reconnecting with the joy of reading. With the satisfaction of finishing a book. With the pride of knowing you can sit down and focus on a single task for as long as it takes.

As my therapist would say: it’s about the journey, not the destination. Find a way to enjoy the process, and don’t give a fuck about the results. Of course, the results will come, but they’re just a nice side effect of having fun.

The only negative note of this plan is that, once I saw the positive results, I started to apply the same strategy to other areas of my life, with not so positive results.

I assume that part of the success of this plan is that it’s simple and easy to follow. There is little friction in reading a book for 5 minutes: you just sit, open the app, and continue where you left off. I guess other areas of my life are slightly more complex, so I’ll have to come up with a different plan for those.

Hacks

Here are some of the hacks I’ve used to keep the streak going (the last one is clearly cheating, but it’s my plan, so I can cheat if I want to):

  • Reading non-digital books. Not all books are available in digital format. I’ve read a few non-digital books this year, and I’ve used this simple trick: I take a picture of the cover of the book, save it as a PDF, and keep my phone or iPad open on that PDF while I read the book. This way, I can keep track of my reading time, and keep the streak going.
  • Read more than one book at a time. Sometimes I realize I’ve made a mistake in choosing a book, and I’m not in the mood for it. Instead of skipping the day, I just switch to another, lighter book. But I always come back to the first one, and finish it.
  • Recovering my streak when life happens. It happened a few times that I missed a day because of unexpected events. You know how it goes: you’re having lots of fun out there, and suddenly you realize you haven’t read yet, but it’s 00:01. Or you started reading too late and fell asleep and the timer stopped at 14:59. For these cases, here’s a trick: put your device in airplane mode, set the date back to the previous day, and read for whatever time you missed that day. Then set the date back to the current day, and read for 1 minute. This way, you can recover your streak, and keep it going. (I’ve only used this trick a few times, but it’s good to know it’s there if you’re the kind of person, like I am, that will lose all motivation if you break the streak.)