Those 6 Tricks Will Help You Read More Books
There are so many books on my “TODO” list at Candl (174, to be precise).
I’m skimming through the list from time to time, cherishing the thought of how much smarter would I be if I read this or another book. Alas, the list keeps growing. It’s embarrassing to say that, but with at my current pace, it will take around ten years to finish them all.
How do I do that? How am I to increase the number of books I read per year?
So I thought, maybe there are some rules, some kind of a system that could help me to improve as a reader. I’m not a terribly stupid person; there must be some way I could figure this out.
So I turned up for help to… the internet, of cause.
Skipping through tons of bullshit, I actually found some useful advices. Here’s my top 10 of what I’ve found so far, in no particular order.
Read 20 pages to start the day.
The first advice comes from James Clear, a productivity guru, the author of “Transform Your Habits” and other books. And the advice is pretty straightforward. After you wake up, right in your bed, before you brush your teeth or take a shower, read 20 pages.
20 is the perfect number because it’s not too much to start with, and the second, it’s enough to be able to read about 36 books per year. Which, you must admit, is not bad at all. Come on. It’s only 20 pages. Something we all can start today.
Make a public commitment
Neil Pasricha, who is the New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome goes further with his method, which allowed him to read more than 50 books per year. You’ll find eight advices in his articles, but I’d like to focus on one of them — making a public commitment.
Open an account at Goodreads or Reco, friend a few coworkers and set your target. Or you can put together a short email list and send short reviews every months or so. By making your goal (like say, read 50 books this year) public you’ll take the responsibility, and thus become more organized and committed.
Accept that it’s okay to quit.
Now, this is one is my favorite. Maybe it’s because I follow it very closely. The one thing that I do very well is quitting the books I started after reading a half. According to Elle Kaplan, this is not really a flow. In fact, this is something we should cultivate in ourselves — quitting the books we’re not interested in, and don’t feel bad about it. It is normal, just let it go.
Another advice from Elle, is
Find curated lists
A lot of smart and interesting people are making their reading lists available to the public. For example, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Those kind of lists are usually of a very good quality, and you can easily pick up any of those books, and not make a mistake.
But actually, the most of the good advises I found from that guy, Andrew Medal, here’s his article.
Read multiple books
Now this one is rather surprising. I always have thought that this habit of reading several books at a time, is rather bad for me. But as it turns out, it can work for people like me who are bored easily. It helps to switch books, to keep the interest. Definitely going to try it out.
Mark it up
Andrew also suggests to make notes, or highlight the books somehow, to make them contextual, when you reread them. What I do instead is somewhat similar, instead I type my notes to Candl account. Candl keeps them private, so I don’t really care about the style and other aspects of public writing. I just log everything I think, so later I can look through the notes and remember what was that book about.
That’s it, folks! Hope you’ll be able to find some useful advice among those.
Special thanks to all the people mentioned this article, who helped me learned some useful tricks!
Enjoy your readings!
P.S.: If you’re a passionate reader you might be interested in this site I’ve built use everyday myself — Candle. It helps track what you read, keep private notes and more. Give it a try!
