I recently watched a video on how Cal Newport reads. In short, he has two main books going. He aims to read a chapter from his "thinking" book in the morning and a chapter from his "fun" book in the evening. Then he adds other reading sessions in the day.
I've been in a bit of a reading rut lately, at least when it comes to non-fiction. I was working on Come as You Are for months and made little progress. Yes, I did read through the entire Silver Ships Saga, but my non-fiction reading was stuck.
While Newport did inspire me to be intentional about reading non-fiction again (and I finished Come as You Are in a few days) we all need to be careful about taking someone else's productivity practice and idolizing it until it becomes the only viable option for our own "success"1. That's a hard thing to get away from when we exist in a culture that idolizes productivity as the best measure of your personal worth2.
I'd love to say that I'll get a chapter of a book done every day, but I know it won't happen some days of the week. Tuesday in particular is a run at 6 am, get the kids to school, and hop into a meeting. Then it's lunch, work, get kids ready for activities and I spend the night running kids around for activities.
I have minutes in the day available for reading...maybe. I've also got to clean the kitchen and take care of dinner in between drop off and pick up of kids. I need to make sure they eat and are headed to bed at the right time. I may be able to get a few pages read, but an entire chapter of most books is a pipe dream.
I think a better option is to aim for more high-quality liesure3 on my busy days instead of low-quality scrolling. Time spent talking with my children, or even a few pages read, is much better than scrolling through YouTube for fail videos.
I write this on a Tuesday morning between the kid drop off and my meeting. I spent a moment looking at my book feeling like a bit of a failure because I wasn't going to get through a chapter and then I realized it doesn't matter. I'm reading regularly and spending less time-consuming content on social media.
That should be good enough for me.
Further Reading