How To Get Motivated Reading After Being In A Reading Slump
If you’re a reader, you know how much fun it can be to transport into different worlds whenever you don’t want to be in reality. However, you also know that reading takes a lot of time and effort, and you aren’t always in a position to sit for a few hours and read a book. Maybe you would rather just watch T.V. or go swimming, or even take a nap for a few hours on your time off. Even when you do have some free time you don’t know what to do with, you might not feel motivated enough to read, this is called a reading slump. It is a depressing time where you have lost all motivation to read and can be very hard to get out of. In this post, I will give you five tips on how to get out of your reading slump and get back into enjoying the life between the pages.
Tip 1) Set a Goal
Before sitting down and reading, set a goal for yourself. For me, I set a goal on how many chapters I want to read everyday until I finish my book. You can do the same thing with pages, or you can even set a timer for how long you would like to read in a day. When you set a goal in your mind, you will want to complete it, especially if it’s as easy as reading a chapter a day. If you want more of a chart for your goals, then I recommend writing down a pace chart for your reading. This way you set a goal for yourself in a certain amount of time. Pace charts are what most book club’s use when reading, they set a goal at the end of every week of each month they read book, which lists the number of chapters to read in those weeks, so you can make sure you finish the book on time.
Tip 2) Use Social Media
Social Media is a huge factor in everybody’s life today, just glance around outside and you’ll see somebody on their phone or laptop. Some of the most popular social media apps people use are Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook, there are millions of users on all of these medias. Most likely, you have one or more of these apps and use them quite regularly, you probably use it to procrastinate when you need to be doing a million other things (don’t worry, I do that too). One way to use these apps to not procrastinate, is to use them when reading. By this, I mean post updates about the book that you’re reading. This is a way to show others that you’re reading and what you’re reading, which can inspire them and will motivate you to finish your book so you can answer all their questions they’ll ask you about it. Goodreads is another social media app specifically for readers; this app allows you to create bookshelves and save what you’ve read and what you would like to read. You can also type in the name of the book you’re currently reading and type in the page number you’re on, and it will show you the percentage of the book you’ve read. This motivates you to keep reading just one more page to make the percentage go higher.
Tip 3) Listen to an Audiobook
Sometimes, you don’t feel like picking up a physical copy of your book and using your eyes to read all the words on the pages, cause that is just too much effort. The solution to this problem, is audiobooks, an audiobook is pretty self explanatory, it’s a book that you download on your device and it reads the book aloud to you. This can become very handy whenever you want to read your book without actually having to set time aside to sit and read the book. Such a time like when you’re driving, or cleaning the house, this also helps time go by quicker since you’re focused on the story being told to you instead of the boring task you’re actually doing. You can also listen to an audiobook while laying in the dark before bed, though this can also be dangerous cause you might slip into the book trance in which time passes without you realizing and then suddenly you’ve been awake all night listening to your book. The app I recommend for getting audiobooks is Audible, your first book is free when you sign up.
Tip 4) Have a book with you at all times
You never know when you might be stuck in one of those boring situations, like standing in line at the bank, riding in the back of a taxi or on a bus, taking a lunch break, and many other situations like this where you’re usually just bored. This is why it is useful to always have a book with you, whether it’s a physical book, an e-book, or an audiobook, you will always have a source of entertainment to go to whenever you get bored somewhere. You might also decide it would be nice to have a relaxing time at a coffee shop one morning, in which you can just grab your book, get your coffee or tea, and find a nice seat in which to sit and enjoy your relaxing morning. This helps motivate you to read more, because you would rather read in boring situations than stare at your shoes.
Tip 5) Try reading something easy and fun at first
One way I found that really helps you get motivated back into reading, is picking up a fun book that is just easy to read. If you try to pick up a heavy difficult novel after not reading for a while, you may find yourself feeling disinterested in the story and then end up putting it back down and not reading it. On the other hand, if you start back out with a short comedy or something, you’ll find yourself enjoying the book and then being proud that you read the book so fast, in which will motivate you to read more books to once again enjoy the portals away from reality.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed, let me know if you want to read more stuff like this!
Page By Page (Kerrie Bevan)
January 13, 2020
