How to read 100 books in a year

I lifted this post title straight from an article on Zapier titled 'How to Read 50 Books a Year, in 7 Easy Steps'. I just doubled the number to make it more appealing.

Though worded like a clickbait title, the author, Stephen Altrogge's content captivated my attention. He offers some sound, practical advice and this was stuff I wasn't practicing, or just didn't know a year earlier. In the light of my dismal progress on my Goodreads 2016 challenge, this is advice worth re-emphasizing to myself.

Let me summarize 5 of the tips I could relate to, here. For a full read, please check out the original post that has several good examples and useful references:

#1: Make your book list.
This helps to not only stay on top of your reading list, but the social integration with friends, recommendations and newsletters keep your motivation levels high.
> I set up mine on GoodReads just earlier this year.

#2: Begin reading atleast 2 books at a time.
To account for mood fluctuations and change in interests at different times of the day/week, this tip retains you within the realm of books. Else, you might end up watching movies, reading endless feeds on Facebook or whatnot.
> I never did this consciously earlier, since I considered it sacrosanct to finish one book cover to cover, before picking up the next.

#3: Read in small chunks.
10 minutes is good enough to catch up on some portion of the text and you don't need hours together to settle down with a book. This is another area where read-out-aloud apps can come in handy.
> This was a liberating tip to break my mental block of the need for atleast an hour to pick up a book.

#4: Learn to increase your reading speed.
Increase your throughput and you increase your net output. There is definite benefit in speed-reading books and I was surprised to hear about browser-extensions and apps that train you on this.
> I have an average reading speed and if the content gets interesting I slow down to savour every word, and take some moments to live the experience vicariously. This tip is something to be tried out.

#5: Be selective with your reading choices.
Life is too short to finish a bad book. There's no shame in putting a book aside or not finishing it, in order to get most out of the next book that you'll actually enjoy finishing. And for some books reading every word might be an 'overkill', and there is a 'layered' approach to get a general understanding of the book.
> This was another revealing tip. A habit closely tied to #2 above, I used to loathe dropping a book midway and there are occasions I had to push myself several weeks to get over to the last page. 

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Contemplating migration onto a new home

Early 2015 was when I resumed blogging after a long hiatus. A couple of months later, I was already contemplating migrating my blog out of Blogger, maybe onto a new, own site or some new-age platform. But having blogged just over 50 posts across 10 years, and with a largely erratic blogging pattern, I wasn't entirely convinced about the effort-outcome tradeoff.

So, I set myself a target of crossing 100 posts overall and maintaining an average of 4 posts a month (roughly a weekly rhythm), before moving the needle on this thought. Now about 1.5 years later, I have crossed 130 posts and also have hit the targeted monthly post average. And this is something that I'm immensely pleased about with myself! Perhaps, talking now about migration is justified.

Before getting onto options being evaluated, one thing I've been clear about is the migration out of Blogger. The Blogger ecosystem is metaphorically like a once-busy city, now in ruins, and not much left for the people who've chosen to stay back. There are newer avenues that have sprung up, each with its own theme, philosophy. And many of them are welcoming and thriving.

I was earlier more inclined towards a self-hosted site using Wordpress. Medium was a strong alternative as well. The more I read about pros and cons of Self Hosted vs Wordpress vs Medium, the more confusing it got. The cons aside, I've been quite excited about Medium and the way the site has been shaping up over the past 2 years. While it seemed to be a good platform for writing content without worrying about the technical aspects, Medium has gotten better at promoting stories, surfacing content and connecting people. The change is noticeable as I've been consuming several blogs off Medium, over the past months.

The option of using custom domains on Medium has recently been introduced and is seeing good adoption. This seems to offer the best of both worlds and suits most of my immediate needs. So, for now, I seem to be settling around a combination - Own domain name on Feedly. 

Staying on top of your online reads

About 5 years back, I had first set up RSS feeds of my favourite news sites and blogs on Google Reader. It was a nice and simple interface to consume content. That was until Google decided to shut it down, amidst huge uproar from loyal users. After evaluating options, I settled on Feedly, which seemed promising and importantly offered one-click migration, by pulling in all feeds from the Reader. It has served me well the past couple of years, and this post is about how I've organized my Feedly account over time to stay on top of content.

With a limited set of feeds, organizing and reading stuff doesn't need much of thought. As you keep continually adding feeds, things start getting a bit muddled with diverse categories of interest, variety of sources (self-hosted websites, medium, blogger, news sites) and a varying velocity of feed generation - ranging from hundreds every week to an occasional gem-of-a-post.

I started simple with just 2 categories to group all feeds or article sources - 'Headlines' or the not-to-be-missed articles and 'Others', that had everything else. Eventually, my sources grew to over 100 feeds, and 'Headlines' ballooned to over 50. Overwhelmed by this torrent of information, I did some minor re-categorisation which didn't seem to help. I was looking for an optimal mix of categories, while also being able to flag off the 'hot sources' across categories.

Preview of my Feedly panel

Eventually I settled on 7 categories (as shown in the image) to organize the feeds, with each having not more than 15 to 20 feeds each. To maintain sanity, I keep purging sources that doesn't match up with consistent content. Feedly has a super-useful feature of flagging of favourite sources by them as 'promote to Must read', which essentially mirrors the same feeds onto a separate list called 'Must reads'.  This list is again kept at around 15 to 20 feeds and any new additions are always after some removals, to keep it manageable. This workflow has been working well for me, and here are things I like most about Feedly:

1. Good UI with a easy procedure to add & organize content. The feed recommendations are quite relevant too.
2. Clean reading interface with 5 presentation layouts ranging from a mailbox view, cards or an online magazine layout to fast-read stuff. I generally use the 'magazine' layout.
3. Features in the free version are good enough for basic usage, with unlimited feeds & social sharing options bundled.
4. Maintains a 30-day window for articles, after which they get cleared. As opposed to storing content over months or years and getting inundated with scary notifications of thousands of unread articles, I've realized that this time-bounded expiry brings in some reading discipline.

My Goodreads Challenge

I have been looking at hitting the "reading" target that I set for myself in 2016. I've noticed that tracking something brings about a good focus and gamification further raises the level of connect. My pace and quality of movie-watching had gone up several notches in the past couple of years, ever since I started using IMDB to track it.

I had stumbled upon a Goodreads challenge and set out to evaluate other 'reading' portals/app available. My evaluation criteria was simple:

• Should have a good catalog of books, including diverse genres and popular Indian authors
• Ability to easily create a reading list, track completed ones and maintain favorites
• Ability to export all the data as a CSV or Excel file at any time

Amongst the sites I skimmed through, Goodreads looked like a clear choice and I went about setting up the account. The initial experience has been great and the site starts offering you recommendations based on your past book ratings. It was a pleasant surprise to notice the integration with Facebook friends and social sharing options.

So, I've taken up a Reading Challenge and signed up to finish 20 books, if not more!