On Building a Reading Habit

It’s end of December 2025. You know that time when you are excited about the new year, annual planning and new plans and all that. The general rule of this exercise is that you first review the previous year and after that plan the next one.

Somewhere in this, I discovered the number of books I read was horrible. Maybe 4 in 12 months. Since I like being smarter, and also because my ever-growing reading list — 100+ books — looked horrible, I made an executive decision: 54 books in the next year. Four a month. One hour a day. Yay.

The reason books specifically? I came across this from Ali Abdaal: think about the effort behind each piece of content you consume. A short-form video — 3 minutes to 3 hours of effort. A YouTube video — 4 to 20 hours. A podcast — a few hours of conversation. A book — years of research, multiple editors, decades of expertise. If I’m going to spend time consuming content, books are the highest return on attention.

Since I am well aware that you need to track what you are trying to improve, and in general I have a boyfriend who loves tracking and maybe I got the addiction — or the skill — from him, I did set up a tracker.

By week two, my reading tracker told the real story. Missing days everywhere. By week three it got worse — dreading it till 11pm, telling myself I’ll do it tomorrow, all the usual excuses. I do hate excuses but somehow they appear all the time, completely out of nowhere.

Clearly, something had to change. Reading 2 hours a week is better than 0 but still not that good, even if I tried to use my girl math skills.

The first step to solving this puzzle was investigating the issue.

What was actually happening

1. One hour seemed too long. I was procrastinating on getting started because I knew I would be sitting for the next hour.
2. Some of the books were not that exciting.
3. I was stressing too much about hitting my one-book-per-week goal and missing the whole point — which is to learn new things I can use and improve in my life, have some fun, and actually have time, energy and capacity to think about the concepts I read.

Considering this investigation, a few decisions were made:

Cut one hour to 30 minutes. 30 × 365 = 182.5 hours. From someone who was reading almost nothing, that’s massive. 30 minutes even looks easy.

If the book is not exciting, stop reading it. It might be a great book but just not what I am interested in at the moment.

Drop the 54-book goal. I was stressing about the number instead of building the habit. If the habit sticks, the books follow.

It’s been a few weeks now after these changes. Even though the number of books I bought in those weeks is more than what I read, my reading tracker isn’t that miserable anymore. Still not perfect, I still miss days, but sometimes I start reading and go way more than 30 minutes. Sometimes I don’t want to put down the book.

As long as I don’t miss two days in a row — the Seinfeld method, where the only rule is don’t break the chain — I should be fine.