1. Make It Your Default Activity
When bored or waiting, we invariably find ourselves resorting to our default device i.e. our phones. The endlessly refreshable, scrollable, swipable feeds are stimulating. 5 minutes become 2 hours.
Instead consider this alternate scenario if you aim to read more books for your own good: You’re bored and you have a book on hand. You read half a page. You read a whole page. Then a chapter. Even if you were to stop at half a page, it would still have been fine, considering that’s half a page more than what you’d otherwise have read.
Read on your commute. Read in class. Read before sleeping. Read right after waking up.
Just replace 30% of the times you take the phone with taking a book and you’ll be amazed. Just choose reading your default. Make it your choice of chilling.
2. Decrease Visual Content Consumption
We consume so much these days. TV shows, web series, memes, reels, what not. In and in and in. On and on and on. But there’s only a limit, right? There’s only so much one can take in.
And if you’re neck-deep saturated with visual media, then there’s no room for other things. You need to make room. You need to remove things from your plate before you can add more. Elimination before addition.
Try to limit/decrease/nullify your visual media consumption and there will be space for the old school books on its own. You’ll find yourself naturally gravitating towards the pages. And that’s how it should be. A natural leaning in towards reading, not forcing yourself to read.
3. Read Multiple Books Parallelly
At any point of time, if you were to ask me what am I reading, more often than not, I’ll start spewing a list of books. Three in the least, generally five.
Why? Why read multiple books parallelly?
Because we crave variety. Different things at different times.
I may be sad and want to read poetry. I may want to motivate myself and read self-help. I may want to read a slow book. A big book. A fiction book. A safe book. A page turner. A cliff-hanger. Oh my, so much variety! Different moods warrant different types of text as being pleasurable, enjoyable.
As for me, I generally have a big, heavy one + a motivational thingy relevant to academics + an easy, light read that I can turn to even if I’m tired AF. These going parallelly.
Right now, here are the ones I’m reading, with their contexts as they concern me:
1. Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More (by Chris Bailey)
Read one section before sitting down to study to clear my head and keep the high up.
2. No Matter the Wreckage (by Sarah Kay)
Read to write. I read poems in here to open the gate of emotions and words inside me so that I can write poems. Yeah. Works.
3. No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness (by Michelle Segar)
I read anything in here and am convinced to go work out.
4. Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment (by Samantha Holland)
Started for obvious reasons. Interesting, if only a little too academic, read so far.
5. The Lupus Book (by Daniel J. Wallace)
After The Emperor Of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, I’ve found that reading a book on the disease/disorder/topic you’re interested in, makes you infinitely more receptive for the textbook content on the topic and it somehow makes you like the topic.
6. The Daily Stoic (by Ryan Holiday)
Ah. It’s a slow read and I’m now enjoying it so this has been an ongoing book since a couple of months.
7. How Not to Die (by Gene Stone and Michael Greger)
Oh my, 800 page book. I’m halfway through and tbvh, it has kinda gotten repetitive at this point. Meat bad, plant good, eat nuts. But yeah, let’s see. Slow read again. Ongoing since a couple of months.
Dhriti Patel 