The Experiment

March 3, 2013

The Problem

In recent years I’ve been reading more and more news online and fewer and fewer books. Instead of sitting down with a novel or a history book I’ve been spending that time on Reddit and Hacker News. It’s not just me, all over the world people are reading less. Despite the high quality content on a site like Hacker News, I get a lot less out of an hour online then I do from an hour of reading. I’ve been reading more news online because simply, it’s easier to find and consume. So I set out to fix this problem.

The (Possible) Solution

I started with a Google Doc spreadsheet, a bunch of HN and Reddit threads of recommended books, and a random number generator. My process was quite simple, any book that sounded interesting was put in the spreadsheet. After I was done trawling through all the different threads I had a list of about 20 books that I wanted to read, each of them correlating with a cell number in the spreadsheet. Using a random number generator I picked out 3 numbers and their corresponding books. I then, for the first time in years, actually read all of them in a short time frame. After completing each one I would enter the pages and a short paragraph of my thoughts on the book into the spreadsheet. The enjoyment of entering the finished books into the spreadsheet compelled me to read more and more and so far I’ve read more in the past two months than I had read in the past year. Is this method revolutionary? Almost surely not, but it helped me.

You can view the spreadsheet here

I’m curious to know whether this method works for anyone else. Make sure to send me a message on twitter if you try it.

Discussion, links, and tweets

I'm a New York City Rails Dev. Follow me on Twitter or don't, I can't tell. But you really should, there has to be some interesting stuff there.