Building a Reading Habit #2: How Much To Read? Start Small!

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One of the biggest challenges in developing a reading habit is deciding how much you can read every day. It’s important that you have a realistic goal.

If you currently don’t spend any time at all reading on a daily basis then starting small is probably wise. Why? Well for one thing you might be out of practice. Yes, you can be out of practice at reading. Reading is like any other skill. The more you read and the more regularly you read the better you’ll be at it.

Small reading goals will help you develop your focus and get used to screening out distractions.

Setting a small goal for daily pages read or time spent reading will help you start your journey toward becoming a regular reader.

• Find something you’re interested in reading
• Set a goal of reading five pages per day, or maybe 10 minutes per day

The idea is to create a small practice that gives you a daily “win.” You might read more than your goal, and that’s great. But fitting that short burst of reading into your day will help you establish the habit.

If you read five pages per day, and a typical novel you might read is 250 pages, it will take you about 50 days to read a book. That’s a lot better than zero books. By reading five pages per day, you will end the year having read about seven 250-page books – a massive increase from zero, for a fairly low daily time commitment!