Shrinking my unread book pile in 10 minutes a day
Little strokes fell great oaks1 (Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, p. 352)
Recently, I established a reading practice as part of my morning routine. Before smartphones, I was reading tons of books every year. But with the arrival of easy to consume, short-form content, I turned more and more to reading blog posts and community discussions and less and less to comprehensive books going deeper into any one topic.
Nonetheless, I didn’t stop ordering books and so my stack of unread books grew bigger each time Amazon was driving by my place. That made me feel guilty. I ordered those books because I wanted to learn more about their subject matter, not to have a nice background for my Webex meetings.
So I set myself the target to read just 10 minutes every morning, including creating a note with a small summary.
I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now and although on any one day I only manage to read a handful of pages, my to-be-read stack has started getting smaller.
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In German equivalent to Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein. ↩