How To Read 6 Books In A Month

Welcome to the weekly column from A Mug of Insights! From now on, I'll dispatch these letters on Saturdays, and paid subscribers will receive their 1-2-Read letters on Mondays. If you like what you're reading, consider upgrading to the Grande tier for journal prompts and a practical exercise every week to strengthen your reading muscles! Thank you for reading, and I look forward to seeing you next week.

Update

If you're enjoying our weekly newsletters, then you'll also love the new season of our podcast under the same name! You can now listen to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods!

Last week, we concluded our three-part series on redeveloping your attention span, and as I was planning new material for October, I realised that I’ve read 6 books cover-to-cover in September.

While this might not sound like an impressive number, it was a pleasant surprise for me. See, back in July, I was barely averaging 1 book a month. Projects like coding the new site for A Mug of Insights and keeping up with the social media flywheel splintered my attention so that distraction-free reading felt like a luxury.

So, when the dust settled around mid-August, I decided to declare war on distractions and wanted to see how far I could push my mind during September. This inspired me to write the ‘Protocols for Rescuing Your Attention’ series, and I’ve covered the key theories & practices I used during the month (you can read the first part here).

However, in this letter, I want to put away the research and sit down, pour a cup of tea and lay out some personal takeaways. Because just like any experiment, theory can only get us so far.

Lesson 1: Don’t try to read more

I’ve always suspected that tracking how many books you’ve read is counterproductive. Sure, knowing that you’ve read 100 books a year might make you feel better about yourself, but that ego boost comes at the expense of the qualitative pleasures of reading: did you enjoy yourself? Has a book changed your life? And did you learn something new about the world?

So, when I started this experiment in August, I had no goal in mind and trusted that if I got the fundamentals right, then the numbers would stack up without effort. The last thing I want is to turn reading into yet another obligatory project, because in reality, a sustainable self-education journey needs to blend into your life as a daily practice. This brings me to:

Lesson 2: Reading needs to become a new default

A lot of advice out there wants you to jam reading into a diet of Netflix, scrolling on Instagram and binging an entire movie via YouTube shorts. But this approach is like drinking a glass of kale juice for breakfast, then immediately pulling into McDonald’s for lunch and dinner. Nothing will change, and reading will always feel like a chore against a backdrop of distractions.

Instead, if you’re serious about treating self-education as a permanent way of life, we need to rewire reading as your new default. In August, I slashed most social media apps from my life and only kept the bare essentials: Emails, the YouTube Studio on my computer and Instapaper (a reading app that allows me to save articles from the internet). This opened up more than 3 hours of free time every day, and because I couldn’t turn to my old distractions, I had to figure out a new way to keep myself busy.

So, after a week of relistening to albums on CDs, doodling on my reMarkable and cleaning the house for the 10^th time, I turned to reading. To my surprise, I loved it as soon as I started reading. In fact, I loved it so much that I would stay past 1 am reading from my Kindle on Friday nights.

Also, I noticed that reading didn’t have the side effects of consuming media mindlessly. I would usually end up in a mental haze after watching an hour of YouTube, but the same hour spent on reading only brought more mental clarity. After two weeks of this rewiring, there was no way to ever see reading as a chore. It was simply a pleasurable pastime that I looked forward to every night.

This is the core teaching from Cal Newport’s book: Digital Minimalism, because sometimes the greatest progress comes from subtraction, not addition. But for this subtraction to work, we have to:

Lesson 3: Become a distraction auditor

The time we claim we don’t have is also time that slipped into the cracks of mindless distractions. And in this case, your Screen Time app is like an IRS tax form or a bank statement: you can no longer deny being a spendthrift with your time.

In August, I averaged a whopping 5 hours and 44 minutes on my phone while I complained about being time poor. This was ridiculous, so one night, I had a sober look at where and how I spent my screen time: 3 hours on Instagram, 2 hours on YouTube and 44 minutes on Safari. Sure, I justified a lot of this clownish behaviour with I’m just getting information, man! But like we’ve covered in the post on long-form reading, 5 hours spent on getting scattered information isn’t the same as 5 hours reading a book.

In addition, if I’m really honest, that 5+ hrs didn’t even make me feel good. The very thing that promises entertainment/relaxation actually left me drained and depressed. This is true for many digital distractions. We’re so mired in them that we don’t even realise that they’re making us feel worse, not better. By the time we start to look for healthier alternatives, the only option left is crashing into bed because we’re drained beyond rescue.

So, be courageous and face your Screen Time tracker like an auditor looking into a negative balance. Where have you wasted your time? Was it worth it? And if not, get excited about what you could be doing instead with hours of free time. I covered this in-depth in part 2 of the series, and the solution isn’t to guilt yourself, but to find satisfying hobbies that will replace the bottomless dread of staring into your phone. This leads me to:

Lesson 4: Make sure you’re having fun with reading

No, Mr Hunt will not hover over your English homework and slap you with a ruler, nor will the book police bash down your door if you abandon a book you don’t like. When it comes down to allocating your newfound free time, read whatever the hell you want and have a blast.

My current reading diet is all over the shop. Non-fiction, fiction, biography, weird dictionaries of criminal slang and even a book on how to listen to jazz. It got so out of control that it confused Amazon’s recommendation engine (I read from my Kindle a lot), to the point where it profiled me as a 50-year-old divorcee and started recommending me back pillows and sleep apnoea machines. But did it matter? No, because I was having fun.

We forget that if we want to do more of anything, then the thing needs to be rewarding enough to justify the effort. But as we’re still carrying the reading trauma from high school, we find it hard to read what floats our boats and leave it there. The way to read way more is simple enough: find what interests you, and you’ll magically find the motivation to read more. It’s as simple as that.

Also, don’t feel pressured to finish a book. Out of the 6 books I did finish, 12 more ended up in the unfinished heap because I knew they weren’t right for me. Be honest with yourself and seek out books you genuinely find intriguing, and when that’s all done and dusted, let’s sustain your reading habits with the last lesson:

Lesson 5: Distract yourself deliberately   

Distracting yourself still has a place because we’re hardwired for novelty. In fact, reading too much will burn you out, and before you know it, you’ll run back to all the mindless distractions, putting you back into square one. What’s the solution? Distract yourself deliberately and don’t let algorithms do your bidding.

This is the key lesson from part 3 of the series, and it’s a part of a broader movement called attention resistance. In short, algorithms will only prioritise time spent on the app, and it’ll serve up all kinds of junk you didn’t look for. Instead, be your own algorithm and assemble a list of distractions you can turn to when you’re getting sick of reading.

I have a whole YouTube watch later list of Karate videos I stream with an algorithm-free version of YouTube (it’s a Chrome plug-in that nukes the Home Page and recommendations). And on my reMarkable tablet, I’ve dozens of articles from newsletters and magazines to give me 5-10 minutes of pleasant diversion. So, whenever I’m not working, reading or collecting bruises in the dojo, I’m always distracting myself with my interests in mind.

So, keep your information diet interesting by signing up to newsletters (this one included), magazines and interesting long-form content/podcasts. And whenever you want to tune out for a minute or two, you’ll know that you have the agency to pursue your own interests instead of leaving it in the hands of technocrats. Also, you’ll find that these self-curated diversions will make you a lot happier in a world of rage-filled, polarity-mongering, machine-curated content.

So, there you have it. 5 lessons I learned from a pleasant month of reading, listening to music and weeding out distractions. Try them out and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Until next week

Robin