The “Thirty pages per day” project

November 13th, 2007 | Comments (13) | Trackbacks (1) |

Although I love reading, I am a notoriously bad reader. This somewhat paradoxical statement has led me to develop the “Thirty pages per day” project.

My stack of “to read” books is growing and I’m barely making a dent. I have maybe five or six books that I’ve started and not finished, and in a couple of those I am at least halfway through. Perhaps it’s built into my personality as an Enneagram type seven: “[Type sevens have a] tendency to believe that something better awaits them, [which] makes them reluctant to narrow down their options or to pursue their aims with true devotion.”

Regardless, the “Thirty pages per day” project is my personal attempt to overcome my reading deficiencies. The process is pretty straightforward: read thirty pages per day from the same book until completion and move on to the next book. This will both help to develop a discipline of reading in my daily schedule and make a bigger dent in my stack of books.

If I remain faithful to the project for an entire year without skipping any days (unlikely), I will have read a total of 10,950 pages. Assuming the average book is 300 pages long (a rather generous assumption, I presume), that amounts to 36.5 books.

I think I might use a productivity secret from Jerry Seinfeld to help me in the project. To ensure he does his task of writing every day, Jerry hangs a big wall calendar and draws a red “X” through every day that he has completed his task. The goal is then to get a long chain of Xs, which encourages you to keep going to avoid breaking the chain. While writing this post I even discovered the website www.dontbreakthechain.com, an online version of Jerry’s concept.

I’ve heard similar projects, like 52 books in 52 weeks, but does anyone else use some sort of program like this to guide their reading habits?