My chain is 949 days long. If I read at least 10 pages before I go to bed it'll be 950. After years of very spotty reading habits, I started a simple experiment that changed my (reading) life. If you're still feeling that new year, new decade self-improvement energy, keep reading and make today the first link in your chain.
Jerry Seinfeld's advice
A few years ago I heard a story about some advice Jerry Seinfeld gave to an up-and-coming comedian. The comedic hopeful wanted to know how to improve his craft.
Seinfeld told him to go to the store. Buy a calendar and a fat red sharpie. Hang the calendar on the wall where you can see it. Then, write a joke, and put an X on today's date. Do this a few days in a row and you have a chain going. The rest is simple: don't break the chain.
66 days to form a habit
Around the same time I heard about Seinfeld's chain, I read a claim about habit formation in a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller: it takes the average person 66 days to form a new habit.
I wanted to read more, so I decided to wed these two methods and commit to reading at least 10 pages every day for 66 days.
Don't underestimate the deceptive simplicity of this method. I've abandoned many plans in my pursuit of more reading: two books per month! Twelve books per year! Lead a book club! Join a book club! All of these efforts failed when the fire died, or I got stuck on a book, or stuck between them. None of them held a candle to the simple daily commitment to read 10 pages per day.
In my 31 months of doing this, I've discovered a few keys to success.
Design your rules
We can get into the minutiae later, but there are two key decisions you need to make out of the gate:
- How many pages do I read per day?
- What constitutes a page?
In my case, I settled on 10 pages because I felt like it was small enough not to be intimidating, but big enough to compound over time. I wanted to make sure that I could still do it after a long night out with friends. It also makes it easy to turn a book into a worst-case-scenario amount of time. 300 pages? 30 days. I often read more than 10 pages, but 10 felt like the minimum to be valuable, and felt achievable even with the densest of texts or latest of nights.
In term of what constitutes a page, there are a few considerations. For me, if I can't "turn" it, I don't count it. So blogs and online articles are out. But things like chapter headings and blank pages between chapters I'm fine with. I also typically count a kindle page turn as a page, even if the page number doesn't increment at the same rate.
Think about what you'll be willing to do jet-lagged and way past your bedtime, but choose a big enough number to be meaningful to you on your average day. The power of the chain will propel you through the relatively few crazy nights per year.
Track your progress
For me, there's nothing more motivating than a clear sense of progress. That's part of what makes the chain so powerful; as you see it grow, you become increasingly proud of what you've accomplished. Seinfeld recommended the calendar. I use a smartphone app called Don't Break the Chain! which is adorably simple and lacking in any sorts of bells or whistles. I've also played with a fancier one called Way of Life - Habit Tracker, but the added features were non-essential distractions to me.
Line Up your Next Book
Once you've settled on your "page" number and established your tracking system, pick a book and get started! Don't be afraid to pick a book that feels a little challenging. If you appropriately calibrated your page count, you'll survive.
As you start approaching the finish line of your current book, it's important to pick out your next book so you're not wandering around the base of the Grand Canyon looking for stray sheets of paper to read (I did maintain my chain during a 5-nights-below-the-rim GC trip!). A good trick here is to load several books onto your kindle at once then turn on airplane mode so they stay on your device after the library hold expires. AFAIK this does not harm the library.
Bail to Harry Potter
Desperate times call for desperate measures. If you know you have something extremely mentally and physically exhausting on the horizon (like the birth of a child!), or if you've reached the end of a long and brutal day, there's no shame in bailing to Harry Potter. The first chapter of The Deathly Hallows is 12 pages. Magic is real. Accio that book and get to reading!
The Minutiae: Stevie's Rules for More Reading
Here are my rules for keeping the chain going:
- the page counter resets every day (no reading 20 pages today and then 0 tomorrow!)
- a "day" is the span of time between when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night (reading after midnight is totally cool)
- the 10 pages do not have to be read in a single sitting
So there you have it. A simple but powerful method to turn days into pages into 950 unbroken links in the chain. Don't break it.
What are some techniques you've discovered to help you do the things you want to do with more consistency?
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