Josh Sherman
I have set out to become a voracious reader. I read as soon as I wake up. I read before I write. I read throughout the day. I mostly read on my phone with the Kindle App. This allows me to accomplish a few things.
First, I have less stuff, specially books. At the monent I have less than 5 physical books. I am reading through them and gifting them out to friends. I don’t have any intention on buying another physical book again.
Second, reading on my Android device means that I can use RescueTime to track the time I spend in the Kindle app. I can passively track how much time I spend reading. I am even able to set and track goals for myself. Right now I have a goal to read every day for at least 30 minutes. Soon I am going to bump that up to an hour.
If you don’t already use RescueTime, I highly recommend that you sign up for free.
So with all this reading I came to realize that my Kindle library is an absolute mess. I have bought books when they were on sale and never started to read them. I have started books and got bored and bailed on them. I have read books and forgot that I had even read them until I hop in and I’m greeted with the last page.
To help get things in order I have started to use collections. I created three collections; Unread, Reading and Read. My intention is to read everything I have so there is no reason to get any more granular or introduce collections like “Won’t Finish” or anything like that. I then went through and put every single book into the applicable collection.
I know this may seem like a trivial hack, but it has worked well for me. At any given moment I have six to ten books that I am actively reading. Even though there are a ton of books I want to read right now, I am forcing myself to work through what I have already purchased, which right now is about another dozen books.
Upon finishing a book, I move it from my reading list to my read list and move something from unread over to reading. I’m actually shocked that Amazon doesn’t make it easier to filter your books by what you have read or not. They have the data, there’s no reason not to. Or perhaps I overlooked this feature?
Got another way to organize your Kindle library? Comment below!
