Inspired by Hannah Gelb from “Hannalyze This“,  I wanted to try reading 100 pages a day. I’m pretty sure she is doing it indefinitely but I thought it would be best to give myself a distinct time frame in which to try it out. I chose January for a few reasons: it’s chilly and dark, I was going on a beachy weekend trip, and I thought it would be a good way to kickstart my 2019 goal of reading 25 books.

Was I successful?

Mostly! For the first three weeks there were 1-2 days a week when I didn’t quite make my goal and would have to make up 30-40 pages the following day. In week four I completely missed two days in a row and had to make them up at the weekend, and in week five I missed one day. I am not letting myself stress out about this – goals are for fun and growth, not to make me miserable. I refused to stay up late and read if I was tired, and if I was prioritizing something else I wanted to take note of that.

Things I Learned:

• I cannot read in bed in the evenings. If it’s post-8pm and I get into bed with a book, I will be dozing off within 10 minutes. I either need to read in the early evening (before dinner) or elsewhere in my house.
• I’m best at reading while engaged in another (passive) activity: waiting for appointments or for timers to go off, and whilst on planes or transit.
• I’m “worst” at reading when I want to be doing other things. This sounds obvious, but the days I didn’t read at all, I was prioritizing errands, cooking, cleaning, painting a room, etc. My main forms of media consumption are YouTube and Instagram, and some days I wanted to catch up on content more than read. This is fine – my time is mine to spend and I get to choose what that means. But prioritizing reading this month made me more aware of what I was willing to cut out versus what I wanted to keep.
• I intentionally picked some books I knew would be fast reads, and 8/13 of the books were re-reads. Part of this was because one of my reading goals this year is to re-read all the books I own, but the other is that it’s much quicker to get through 100 pages when I’ve read the book before.
• Reading 100 pages a day = reading a lot of books. My goal for the year is 25 books and I’m already halfway there!

Summary: I can definitely make room for daily reading in my life, and I think I’d like to. But maybe not 100 pages. I think I might try to do a timed reading goal for February – maybe 20-30 minutes?