Habit #2 - How to Read One Book per Week

If you have ever listened to any of Brian Tracy‘s audio programs you may be familiar with this concept. He states that if we commit ourselves to read one book a week for 10 years, we would eventually become an expert in a specific topic. Steve Pavlina has already written about the importance of this habit. If you don’t have the time to go through his whole post, he basically say that reading one book a week is a huge benefit because we constantly feed our mind with new informations, therefore providing a sort of workout for our brain.

I’ve read a lot of books in the previous months, but I have not always respected the one book per week rule. After many months I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s holding me back is the lack of a detailed plan. I’m talking about those kind of plans used for GTD where you write all the steps required to achieve a goal. I decided to try to do the same thing here, and to share the details with you.

There are still 26 weeks till the end of the year, so my goal is to read at least 26 books before December 31, 2009. I’m making a new entry on my project page for every week of the year, and I write the name of the book I intend to read inside of it. The most difficult task is to figure out what to read for each week. I could simply go through every book on my bookshelf that I haven’t read yet but that would not be a good approach because what I want is to create the right mix between different topics. The other problem is that it is not possible to read every book in just one week, especially technical ones. I have books that takes years to be completely read and understood.

Because my main job is to program computers, my approach is to read one technical book per month, and the remaining three weeks to go through my other stack of books related to personal development, business and marketing. To evaluate in which order to read the books, I’m simply asking myself which one would provide the most value or which one stimulates more my curiosity.

Now every time I’ll do my weekly review, I will allocate the required time for every day in the week to read the book. Usually this means 1 hour per day. Finally I will add a few more hours in the weekend to go through those books that takes years to complete.

If you want to read one book per week, my advice is to plan in advance which one to read, and to allocate extra time each week for those books who takes a lot of time. Some time ago I couldn’t believe that reading one hour per week would eventually translate to 50 books per year, but now I have no excuses.

I’m curios to learn if you are using different approaches. Please note that it is not my intention to read a lot just for the sake of doing it.

Posted on June 30 2009

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