Reading Calculator

I recently had a conversation with somebody (a few people actually) about how
much time I have to put in to read as much as I do. The short answer is, a lot.
The longer answer is that it really depends on the individual and how you want
to approach your reading goal.

First thing you have to figure out is how you want to attack things. One method,
which my buddy Justin used to swear by is simply putting in the time.
Every day he would read 30 minutes. For him this was roughly 15 pages per day.

Speaking of pages, another approach would be to read a certain number of pages
per day. My wife mentioned reading chapters, but unlike pages, not every book
has chapters.

For me, nothing beats trying to knock out a percentage of a book per day. It’s
easy to track on an e-reader and it scales across books. Every book can be
broken down into 10% chunks, regardless of size.

Obviously, these metrics really depend on your personal reading speed, the
number and size of pages in the book and even the font size per page! For the
sake of this calculator, I’m defaulting to the average adult reading speed of
200 WPM (find your reading speed here), an average of 250 words per
page and an average book length of 350 pages.

As previously mentioned, this all came up because of some choice conversations
over the last month or so. One conversation that really stuck out to me was one
about how reading 10 books would be a huge milestone. I thought, what if we
broke that down into manageable daily chunks? Turns out if you read a little
less than 12 minutes a day, you could realistically knock out ten 350 page books
in the next year!

So have at it, see what kinds of reading goals you can accomplish this year!

Got your plan? Ready to kill it? Why not Treat. Yo. Self. to a new book
to start things off?