My reading list for 2015

A rather mad attempt to read 52 books in a year

You’ve probably heard of Mark Zuckerberg’s new year resolution — He is going to read one book every other week, I quite liked the challenge myself and went for one book every ONE week. I’d like to share my progress in here and my approach to this. For anyone interested in the 52–week reading challenge I highly recommend checking out Robin’s website.

Consume the knowledge

Let’s start of with why I wanted to read so much in the first place, my last two years were piss-poor: I’ve read 4–5 books and probably a dozen of articles. I have been busy, working on two or three side-projects and had a really stressful time at work but any other spare time I spent on either complaining that I don’t do enough or playing some games (there wasn’t that much of the free time left after a full-on day at my job). The lack of structure in my outside-work activities left me with a feeling of guilt, frustration and that I haven’t accomplished enough of what I had in mind in the first place.

Well, for past 3–4 months I noticed a slow transition, I started to care more about having a bit more structure to my personal development. I spent my Christmas break on learning iOS development and learning script calligraphy (you should try it too! It’s fun until you spill the ink on the carpet or your clothes).

The goal for the next ~52 weeks became simple: I don’t want to stop learning and I want to consume more and more knowledge from a variety of fields: Art, Digital Design, Programming, Astrophysics, practically anything else that I find particularly interesting and books are the perfect medium for it!

The topics of books are straight forward:

Sci-fi / Fiction
Project/Business management
Architecture
Service/UX design
Art/Visual design
And more…

Rather than listing out every book I thought I’d just share my Trello board with you, the whole reading process is divided intro 4 columns: Backlog of books I chose to read, picked up: ones I have already started reading and indent to finish them, reading and done. Having a clear, two-dimensional overview of how I’m doing with the reading list is great — I know exactly where I‘m at and I see my commitment to books.

By the way, you should try Trello yourself — I use it to plan/organise my projects, plans and blogposts, here, let me sign you up! If you need any help setting up/tips/best practices tweet me @bobek_balinek

So far so good, I’ve finished two books in the first week as I was half-way through them, but the beginnings are always easy, I’ll make sure to share the progress mid-year, things will get interesting.

Now this might sounds overly ambitious but when you mix really short books with really long you’re definitely getting close to the 52-books mark. I’d love to hear more about different ways going about reading, would reading two books at the same time, interleaved work? If you have any tips, comment here or send us a tweet.

…and you?

I’m sure I’m not alone, there must be more people out there feeling an itch to read/learn more, what do you think? Are you doing something similar?

– Bobby