My Reading Habit

Cal Newport says on his podcast that he reads 5 to 6 books a month by making reading his default activity.

Cal has three kids, teaches in Georgetown and runs a growing media empire! He still manages 5 to 6 books a month — this adds up to 60 to 72 books a year!

Cal said look at your phone’s Screen-Time report, so I did. I was using my phone 2 to 3 hours a day. That is almost 20 hours a week! A part time job of looking at my phone on top of a full-time job on my computer.

If you ask people, they will say they want to read more but can’t find the time. I found some time to read one book a month. So I decided to make more time.

Here is what I did:

• Deleted all social media apps
• Deleted YouTube app, signed out of YouTube on my browser
• Put the TV in the house where it is not too comfortable to watch it for long
• Read in the morning before the world wakes up — I read between 6 AM and 7:30 AM
• Make reading intentional by taking Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes
• Made reading my default activity as I wait between tasks — so I may get 30 mins during lunch, 15 mins while dinner is cooking and maybe another 30 mins before bedtime

One last but important technique on reading more is to add variety. I sorted my unread books into four stacks.

1. Easy Fiction — less than 300 pages, easy to read. Leguin, Grace Paley, Ian McEwan are in this stack.
2. Short and Hard (fiction or non-fiction) — less than 300 pages, academic or classics where the language or subject matter make it harder to read. Virginia Wolf, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott are on this stack.
3. Short and Easy Non-Fiction — these are less than 300 pages and are typically not written by academic types, so the language is easy.
4. Long or Hard Non-Fiction — these are over 300 pages, typically 500 or more pages. Zuboff, Dalio, Ian McGilcrist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are in this stack

I alternate between each stack. When one stack makes me think hard, another replenishes my brain. When one book takes over two weeks to read, I finish another in a few days.

I finished four books in October, five in November and six in December. The variety surely helped. Removing the habit of phone and TV helped the most!

2021 in Review

2021 was a year of extremes. It was the second year of living in the COVID pandemic. My wife and I are fatigued by how restricted our movements are. On the other hand, living at home more than not has encouraged me to form insights that I am not sure I would have gained had there not been a pandemic.

With a slight hint of ableism and a dash of first-world-problems, here are things that worked well and some that didn’t:

Things that I struggled with:

1. Project Dog — We adopted Ruby, the calmest and quietest 5 year old dog from the Humane Society in April. Turned out she dealt with anxiety, panic attacks, never lived indoors, and was in poor dental health. She possibly had attention-deficit-disorder type symptoms that made it impossible for her to learn obedience.
2. Burnout — we skipped vacation in the Spring and Summer. Work was high because everyone wants to ship commerce now. Our Project Dog was a lot of work. Summer was exceedingly hot and humid. I got increasingly irritable till my wife insisted we take time off.
3. Delta variant, and then Omicron — when it felt safer to start going out and seeing friends, the Delta variant broke out and we retreated back into our shells. It has been frustrating to see masks disappear almost everywhere outside a doctor’s office. My wife and I tend to be the only masked people at stores.
4. Immunocompromised — We found out earlier this year that my wife is immunocompromised. This makes it extra hard for us as the variants come out while people get more and more relaxed about masking up!
5. No Podcasting — I had hopes and dreams to write, record, edit and publish 6 episodes this year. I think I posted one. Everything I mentioned above sucked all willpower to be creative.

Things that worked well:

1. Realizing the power of taking time off — this has to be on the top of the list. We took a vacation after I was already feeling burned out. It helped to get away. Just getting away, no internet, several books and hiking trails near by.
2. Refining Perspective — By August I was claiming the whole year 2021 was a bust. By September I started realizing it was only the Summer that was tough. I used this insight to start logging my thoughts daily so I can question my own ideas, especially the big-bad ones like “2021 sucks”! Now I have a plan for 2022 thanks to this insight.
3. Books, books, books — I started reading a lot more, enough to push through an inertia of sorts and gain momentum in reading. I went from a book a month to 6 books in December! I started taking detailed notes but in a way that I have not taken before. I should expand on that another day.
4. Metacognition — this puts a name to the thing I have been pursuing. The idea of metacognition — thinking about my own thinking, finding out that my love for truth is bigger than my love for what I already know — this feels like a core value and I am glad I discovered it. Now I know its name.
5. Internet Sabbath — I switch off internet use on Saturdays allowing only texts and phone calls on my phone. The effects flow into the weekdays. This has significantly curtailed the amount of YouTube and Internet-TV shows I used to binge. Probably 2 hours or more every day! Gone!!
6. High-Quality Relaxation — With TV gone, I found a few ways to have a high-quality relaxation. Walking our dog with my wife is one. Taking a drive in the evening and listening to a podcast is another. There was a time I felt passively watching TV was all I could do at the end of a workday. What a waste!