Reading books is one of the finest quality habits you can build.

Before we dive into how you should read every day, let’s understand why you should read:-

1. Get a different perspective on life
   Seeing life from your own perspective for too long can narrow down the possibilities. It also limits the understanding you may have about society, life and your surrounding. When you read books, it helps you to see the very same thing but from a completely different perspective. It helps to open new ways for yourself and create a completely different thought process.

2. Improve imagination
   Consuming content and the same storylines in the form of videos is far easier. As everything is laid out in front of you. When you read books, you get a chance to sharpen your own creative skill. You create the situation, scene, and plot described in the book. The more you read, the better the imagination gets.

What to read?

If you haven’t read books in past, then you would need to understand that it might take some time for you to get hold of it. It’s still easy but you need to know the right process.

To speed up the process, I would recommend start reading fiction novels instead of self-help books. The reason is pretty simple when building a new habit the best way to start it is in an interesting way. Otherwise, you may make it boring and forever hate building that particular habit.

I have known many people who started by reading self-help books and were not able to be consistent with them. When you do that, you are trying to process and take two things. One is Reading habits + Consuming knowledge by doing the same. Since being a beginner, it’s not an easy task. Take one thing at a time and work on it.

How to read? (Most Important)

(5 mins / 10 mins / 20 mins) OR (2 page / 5 page / 10 page)

Follow the above rule.

Pick a time of the day when you read it. Before you decide on the time of day, give yourself answers to the below IMPORTANT questions:-

1. Can you actually read at the same time every day?
2. Do you have anything planned on the same day in the coming days?
3. If you can’t read on some days during that time, what’s the alternate time you want to use to read?

Point 3 is the most important. During that day, events are not planned. You may encounter things coming in an ad-hoc manner that hijack your reading time. To make sure you have read everything, you should have a backup time.

If you don’t have two planned times of the day for reading (primary and backup), you are bound to skip reading every day. Once the flow breaks, you will start blaming other events in your schedule for it. and, that’s stupidity though.

Now coming back to the rule, pick a role of pages or minutes and stick to it for a week.

Remember to avoid burnout. Once you have complex X mins or Y pages as targeted, find the closest paragraph which ends and close the reading session. The reason behind this is that our GOAL is to start slow but MAKE SURE WE READ EVERY DAY. We don’t want to read 20 pages in a day and for the next 5 - 10 days we don’t touch the book.

There is beauty in consistency and cannot be explained. It can only be felt by the owner of it

How to track it?

The simple rule of life is, you cannot improve what you don’t measure.

To start with, do not make it complex. You absolutely don’t need to buy any todo or tracker app for it.

Two simple options I would recommend:-

1. Notebook - One of the best ways and always next to you. When you hear about a book, right the name of it. Have some thoughts while reading a book, and write to it.
2. Use Notes app - Every phone has a default note-taking app. Create a note to track the book names. You can also create another note to track the thoughts you want to collect while reading the book.

Remember, reading every day is one of the finest habits you can build and you will always be grateful for it.