HOW AND WHY I SCHEDULE MY READING

Chaos. That’s how I’d describe my old reading habits. With countless books out of the library that, I admit, there was no chance I’d ever read, plus new (and old) arrivals stacked up in heaps on my shelves, not to mention my digital shelves on my Kindle, which was hundreds of books deep, I had no strategy to actually want to read and finish anything. There was no way I was going to accomplish my reading achievements, like reading a book a week for a total of 52 in the year, nor was I going to keep up with my reading for Book Riot’s TBR, where I work as a Bibliologist, and not for my monthly column of “Recommended Reads” that I write for my hometown newspaper.

Something had to happen. Something had to change. I could not go on like this. A few months ago, I started to schedule my reading. It all started with a note in my Notes App. I listed the books I’d read so far that month. It was useful to see them all right after the other without any kind of styling with extra bells and whistles that come with your Goodreads Read page. Just a list of books, nothing more, nothing less.

That inspired me. Once I saw the books I had read listed there, I realized I was motivated to make that list go longer. Meanwhile, both my digital and physical TBR list was overgrown like kudzu and getting worse by the minute. My To-Read list on Goodreads was way too deep to manage. There were books on there that I wanted to read a decade ago and knew I was never going to get around to finishing. Just looking at it gave me anxiety. I needed something more manageable. And so I started to list the top 15 or so books I wanted to read in the near future in another list in the Note.

This both inspired and, at first, daunted me. I couldn’t see my way to reading all of these books in the next few weeks. But, I reasoned, it might be doable for the coming months. And what better way to do it than schedule my reading time?

Next, I broke the month into different sections, with each week of the month underlined. I then chose a few books per week, settling at about four since I finish anywhere from one to four books a week. As the days went by in the week, I adjusted and moved things around if need be, such as when a book was taking longer to finish than I expected.