Dec 02, 2025

How To Design A Personal Curriculum For 2026 (That You'll Actually Finish)

Announcement: after gathering bags under my eyes, we've finally wrapped up A Mug of Insights' rebrand (go check out the home page!) and launched our SESSIONS workshop series. From December, we'll now publish one monthly workshop + demonstration to transform fear into clarity, confusion into confidence along your reading journey, and the first session is now live, so go and show it some love!

Attend The First Session

To me (with the Christmas spirits on my side), a TBR is like the Bible. It guilts you with shame, it taunts you with games, and most people own it just to feel like they're better than everyone else, yet no one ever bothers to finish it.

Instead, this is how most people's tragic love affair unfolds with their TBRs:

It starts with a passionate kiss in January. They are consistent, diligent, and they read a lot.

But then, as the mid-year freak-out rolls around, their progress dips a little. Then, after a week of guilting themselves into reading more, they get a slight uptick in their progress.

Then, from August to November, it all goes to hell. Families fly in for Christmas, their nephew screams for a new yo-yo, and their company is hosting a giant EOY party. Their TBR becomes a guilty reminder of their patchy reading progress throughout the year.

And come December, they're desperate to read more again, so they vacuum up books from Black Friday sales, look for reading hacks, and now they're committed to coming up with a new and improved TBR. Because, surely, this new year will be different, right? Right?

No. The same cycle repeats. We're flying high in January, shot down in June and are left eating mud in November. And in my experience, most people never break out of this dead cycle because of three things:

1: Decision paralysis. They throw random titles onto their TBR and sink way more time deciding what to read next than actually reading.
2: Not tailoring the books to their needs. They fall into everyone else's recommendations instead of asking themselves: what the f do you want?
3: Not having a quantifiable measure of their reading goals. No, page number isn't a quantifiable measure. We need better metrics for gauging our reading progress to feel a sense of accomplishment

And the solution to this problem is quite simple: your TBR needs to be a reflection of your priorities in life, not a trophy case that'll guilt you into chasing arbitrary reading goals.

Ideally, each book should fit into one of these three categories:

1: Ideas I need to improve my life (self-help, recipe books, etc)
2: Ideas that scratch my personal intellectual interests (leaning into what you want to learn and enjoy the journey)
3: A few aspirational titles that I want to finish this year (starting that impossible book that you've always wanted to crack)

So, whenever you're tempted to add a new book to a TBR, see if it aligns with one of the three categories as you refine the scope of the titles that you want to finish.

But Robin, you might ask, what if I accidentally find an interesting book that doesn't fit into these three categories, and how do I come up with a plan to read the books in those three categories?

I'm glad you asked. This leads me to a brand new project that I've just launched called SESSIONS: a two-part monthly workshop available for paid members.

Each session is designed to give you a concrete step to solve a thorny problem in most aspiring readers' lives, and our first session is going to run you through a framework where you'll design your dream personal curriculum and come up with a plan to finish it.

In this first session, we'll cover

Why most TBRs fail
A filtering system to help you land the right books
A crucial distinction between keystone texts and context texts
How to inspect a book to see if it's worth your time

And we'll have live demonstrations, worksheets and more to hold your hand through the process. So, if you're keen to join me on this journey, I have an early bird offer for you here, so you can get instant access to this workshop + all upcoming sessions.