Tag: goals

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book reading

New Goal for 2014 (part 1)

It’s almost that time again when I round up how well I’ve down with the year’s reading goals and set the new ones for the next year. Well I’m going to do half of that (setting goals).

Erm actually I’m going to do half of half of that (set some goals). Or a quarter of a half. Or something…

I’m officially signing up for the “TBR Triple Dog Dare” – which is a challenge to only read from your TBR list for Jan, Feb and Mar. My TBR is pretty healthy and gives a wide selection to choose from.

Actually I’ll go one further and say I want to finish books I’ve already started. OK so that’s my goal for Jan-Feb-Mar. If I get bored I’ll allow myself TBR books that I’ve not started.

Categories
reading

Reading Goals 2013

Every year I tweak my goals a bit – we’ve have 25 books, 6000 pages 2010 and 2011 and RED –  and this year will be no different. Except perhaps that it’s more than “tweak”.

This year I do have a number of goals but I also have a guiding principle and I’ve decided that my goals are all things to aim (note the “try to”s below) for but the guiding principle is what over-rules everything. So here goes…

Goals

  1. Try to read 40 books this year. 50 was a stretch but I managed 34. 40 will be another stretch but doable I hope.
  2. Try to reduce my To-Be-Read (TBR) list by 16. It’s currently at 251 so that will make a nice round 235.
  3. Try to finish all the books I start. May be harder and this goal is likely to be most in conflict with my Guiding Principle.
  4. Try to reduce my Goodreads “Currently Reading” shelf to 1 (or 2,3… if I’m genuinely reading them at the same time). Ever since I started using Goodreads I haven’t taken a book off my CR shelf unless I put it there in error or I finished reading it. This includes books I started, stalled on and later re-started from scratch. So essentially this boils down to “finish/re-read books I previously started”.

Those are the goals and the only goals. No page-counts, genres or other factors involved.

The Guiding Principle

In pursuing these goals I will abide by the following principle, especially when taking action which may appear to conflict with one of the goals (like abandoning a book, or increasing my TBR):

Reading is supposed to be fun, try to enjoy it.

Taking it a Step Further

Thinking about the Guiding Principle has made me wonder about being even more radical. Let’s just review how we got here.

This all started really because of  Harry Potter. Remember “Am I Crazy”? I wanted to re-read all the HP books before the new one came out. The need/desire to figure out if I was on track gave birth to my first tracking spreadsheet – crude and simplistic compared to what was to come. The next significant event was in 2009 when I realised that I’d only read 4 books in the whole of 2008. So “25 Books” was born and an improved version of the spreadsheet was created.

As 25 Books turned into 6000 pages I found that I needed/wanted a better spreadsheet to track what I was reading. This is essentially what I still use today, although even in the last couple of days I’ve been improving it further.

Now let’s be honest, there’s a geeky pleasure in the tracking itself. I like setting up the spreadsheets. I like watching the effect as I record time spent reading, comparing my pg/hr rate for my current book to previous ones or the overall average, working out roughly how long it will take to get to the next chapter, or next book, how far behind target I am and so on. All this is its own kind of fun but it’s not really about reading. Worse it’s possible it even detracts from or is displacement for actual reading.

It’s odd to think – it’s become so normal for me – but for the last four years whenever I’ve picked up a book to read I’ve also been making a note of how long I read for and how many pages I read. It’s not that big of an overhead and since I mainly read ebooks any device I’m reading on is automatically also a device I can record this info on. But the fact is that it doesn’t have that sense of just picking up and starting to read and maybe, just maybe it’s one of those barriers to entry that I was talking about in a previous post.

So here’s the idea: maybe I’ll give up the spreadsheet this year. I’ll still keep a note of which books I read, and I’ll certainly put up reviews but I’ll pass on the slightly obsessive recording part.

At least that’s the idea. I’d be giving up the geeky fun part in the hope of getting something else in return. That something I guess would be a sense of it being a lighter, simpler fun activity rather than a chore or an assignment. But there’s a part of me that will miss using my shiny new spreadsheet.

So that’s what I’m thinking but I’m still not sure if I’ll do it. Ultimately having fun whilst reading is probably more about choosing the right books.

Categories
reading

8 Hours of Pleasure

…or More Thoughts on Reading

So I’ve just finished another book but rather than write it up straight away I wanted to post about something else, something related to reading itself.

I’ve noticed that I’ve developed something of an anxiety about what book to read next. This is partly because the choice is so potentially huge. Even amongst just the books I currently own and have never read I’ve probably got enough reading material for a few years at least.

M. tells me that in one of the Discworld books I’ve not read yet a child is placed in a room with every kind of sweet imaginable, and the child is in danger of starving because he can’t choose knowing that once he chooses one he’ll exclude all the others he could have chosen. It’s a bit like that.

My answer to this has been to try to plan to read more frequently and therefore more quickly, so that if I do start to read the “wrong” book I’ll be through it and on to the next in a week or so. I’m already thinking that “6000 Pages 2012” might be something along the lines of “Read Every Day” instead of its current form (though I’d hate not to be able to compare my stats).

It hit me that the way I read now is sort of predicated on having to “get through” a book, more than likely on the expectation that I’ll not enjoy it but that I’ll get the satisfaction of adding to my pagecount, days read etc on my spreadsheet. I find myself thinking “I want to finish this current book so I can move on to the next book” and feeling frustrated that a book takes so long to complete (around 8 hours reading time for me for a 400page book).

Then it occurred to me that I didn’t always think this way. OK, I always did a little. I used to be much more anal about not abandoning books even though I wasn’t enjoying them. However it struck me that rather than see it as 8 hours of “work” I have to complete to get to the next book I should view it as 8 hours of pleasure. That I should be torn between wanting to read more because I’m loving it and holding back because I don’t want to finish too soon and have the experience be over.

Of course that partly depends on the books I read being good – which is where we came in – but actually unless I’m being dishonest with myself they aren’t that bad (average rating 7.4 so far this year).

So, and I’m thinking as I write, I think I need to read more frequently, in smaller chunks and be more ready to give up on a “bad” book (after giving it a decent chance). I wonder if part of that would be to abandon the whole spreadsheet approach altogether – now there’s a scary thought!

Categories
6000 pages reading

6000 Pages

Something a little more positive.

Up until a couple of days ago I was all set to launch “20 books”. This was to reflect a change in priorities of my reading goals. As I said in the wrap-up of 25 books, last year I wanted to read more widely – hence different genres, authors and so on. This year I mainly want to concentrate on reading a little more, and spreading it out a little more. My idea was to have a target of 20 books but with points for longer books so that overall I read more.

Whilst I was considering writing this up, I realised that a better way to do this is to set the goal for the number of pages. Last year I read just under 5000 pages, so let’s aim for 6000. The reason this is better is also partly to do with my spreadsheet. My 25 books spreadsheet (as well as the 20 books one I had begun) is based on the one I created a couple of years ago for my Harry Potter marathon. I had in effect merely expanded the number of books and the time period. But that was for a specific goal – to read all books by a particular date. It was therefore a good thing to be able to see what page of what book I should be on and how close to that I was.

But applying that to a whole year didn’t work as well. It meant that at any one time I could only really have one book on the go. I had no way of counting reading time for a book I set aside and then later finished. Also once I was reasonably far behind (as I soon was) the ‘target’ figures became meaningless in terms of motivation. Knowing I should be 4 books ahead of where I was it didn’t make much odds which page I was on!(1)

But by making it about pages – and designing a new spreadsheet accordingly – I can count all my reading. I can have more than one book on the go at once(2). I can monitor my targets in terms of pages read, pages/day, days read etc. It’s also much simpler.

The New Rules

So here’s the new scoring rules. They are designed to give me a stretch, to hopefully allow a similar score to last year for a similar amount of effort (so I can aim to ‘beat’ my score, even if the basis is entirely different) and they are aimed at the underlying goals of reading more and more often.

1. Page count – my goal is 6000 pages but my benchmark is 5000, just above last year’s. For every 100 pages above or below 5000 add or deduct 1 point.

2. Days read – last year I managed 71 days. Adding a fortnight to that makes a nice round 85. For every day above or below 85 add or deduct 1 point – upto a maximum of +15 or minimum of -10.

3. Book length – last year my average book was 274pages. I always felt like I was looking for short books that I could finish quickly. That felt a little like cheating. So this year I can gain points for reading longer books. Round up the average page count to the nearest 5 and:

  • 0-250pages – -1 point
  • 251-300pages – 0 points
  • 301-325pages – 1 point
  • 326-375pages – 2points
  • 375-500pages – 5points
  • 500+pages – 10points

Knowing how a few low scores bring an average down(3) I suspect I’ll find it hard to get more than 2 points – but that’s ok.

4. Only one unfinished book counts. I expect this to be the last one. It means I don’t have to race to finish whatever I happen to be in the middle of on 31-dec (unless I want to)

Not really a scoring rule, but a goal is to not get more than 1 book behind on writing them up in the blog. So before starting book 5 for example I really ought to have written up book 3. I use the example of 5 and 3 because I am on book 3 and haven’t written up book 1 yet – but hopefully I’ll put that right tomorrow.

(1) Actually this was a little bit of a problem with the Harry Potter books too. If you remember I wanted to finish book 5 before the movie came out and that meant I needed to be well ahead of where the targets otherwise said I should be

(2) I don’t generally like to do this anyway but it’s surprising how many times I would have liked the flexibility.

(3) Whenever I make the 275mile trip back to my parents, I usually entertain myself by keeping track of my average speed. The journey is 10 miles of town traffic with the rest on the motorways. I’m always amazed by how long you have to go at 80 to raise the average speed to something decent when it’s been affected by the initial stretch (averaging 10-15)