How to develop a book-a-week habit

Langston Hughes

I try to finish reading a book every week, and have managed this pace for the last five years. A few days ago, I posted my 2016 reading list and several friends asked how to build a reading habit that would allow them to read more. This post is an answer to those questions.

First, it’s probably important to note that it’s not that big a deal to spend 10 hours a week reading books. Just looking at the most recent bunch of books I read, the audio editions, in hours, are 6.5, 9.25, 15.75, 10.45, 5.75, 7.25, and 9 hours long, for an average of just over 9 hours long — and that’s before they’ve been shortened a bit by listening at 125% or 150% speed. The average American aged 35–49 watches more than 33 hours of TV per week, according to Nielsen. (And the average US Facebook user spends about 4.6 hours per week on Facebook.) I read about 25 hours a week once I add in my addiction to The Economist, the NYT, the WSJ, and all of my RSS feeds. It’s a question of priorities.

And that’s where I think my most important suggestion comes in. I make reading a priority because I find a way to justify it to myself. I’ll tell myself, “this book is for my kids, because reading it will make me a better parent to them,” and that has allowed me to read a couple dozen parenting books. Or I’ll tell myself, “this book is for work, and reading it will help me create more value there,” or “this book is for self development, and reading it will make me a better person.” When I frame things in this way, I tend to do what’s required to find the time and prioritize reading and protect the time.

Additional tricks I use to keep my mental diet high-fiber:

• I volunteer to do dishes every evening because it gives me an opportunity to put my headphones in and listen to books.
• I take long walks (urban hikes, grocery shopping, other errands) while listening to books, though I find it impossible to do anything complex (like shopping) while listening to books.
• I walk to work while listening to books.
• I listen at the gym, though books only work for steady-state cardio. The tougher stuff (HIIT) requires music.
• I take a day off of work now and then to power through a just-released book in a day … these are such satisfying days.
• I endlessly edit the list of books I’m going to read next so that I’m always eager to start the next one. I don’t ever want to get in a situation where I’m punishing myself with reading or dreading something that’s on the list.
• I’m a procrastinator, so reading is an avoidance mechanism I use to feel a little less guilty about the thing I should probably be tackling head-on. I often find myself doing reading that can be related to the project I dread the most. Ironically, reading for procrastination sometimes ends up breaking my logjam, because the perspective I gain from books often helps me make sudden and rapid progress on work projects.

That’s my short list of strategies and tactics.

Before I wrap, two more notes. One: I’m not nearly as well read as most of my intellectual heroes, and I’ve got fairly typical retention of material (neither great nor awful) so I really don’t believe that four or five-dozen books a year is much of an accomplishment. Just needed to put that out there, because I don’t want to appear to be bragging about what to me feels like a very modest achievement.

Two: I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I’m using reading as an intellectually acceptable form of time-wasting so that I can avoid the real scary work of making myself vulnerable by building, writing, creating, and launching new work into the world. That suspicion is why books like Big Magic, Choose Yourself, Porcelain, The B Corp Handbook, Lean Startups for Social Change and Crush It! were on my 2016 list. I’m still targeting a healthy reading list for 2017, but I must find a way to spend more time creating and doing because — to me — all this reading is futile if I’m not acting on the lessons learned. One of the smartest people I know (and admire) is the CEO of a great company and hasn’t read a book in many, many years.

So maybe my dream deferred just sags like a heavy load [of books].