Four Easy Steps To Building A Reading Habit.

In true January style, it's the time of the year where you will read many blog posts, articles, Instagram posts and tweets, talking about New Year's Resolutions and setting goals for the year ahead. I wanted to share a technique that I used during the middle of last year to build up my own habit around reading.

When my boyfriend and I were doing the first of many clear outs around the house, I started in the spare room which held a lot of my books, and I realised that there were more books that hadn't been read than there were that had been read. Once I cleared through the ones that I genuinely wanted to read, there weren't that many left and for my birthday in August, I asked for books that I was really excited to read based off my own interests and recommendations based on other books I had read previously.

Now that I had books I was excited about, I wanted to read them all but I knew that I needed to have a system in place first before I could get too excited. Below, you will find my top four pieces of advice to build your own reading habit no matter when you are reading this.

Find out what type of reader you are.

Finding out what type of reader you are is the first step in this process. How fast or slow do you read? What type of books did you enjoy when you were younger? Have you looked at any books recently that you thought you may like? What peaks your interest about a certain book?

This shouldn't take too long, you don't have to conduct a full investigation of course but it's always easier to take a few minutes before breaking down your habit, it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm quite a slow reader but once I'm really into a book, I can fly through the pages; my two favourite authors when I was younger were R.L Stine and Jacqueline Wilson and my reading interests are now self-help, personal development and autobiographies based on what articles I tend to veer towards online.

Choose a book you are genuinely interested in.

If you choose one piece of advice to take away from this post, let it be this one; choose a book you are genuinely interested in reading. If you choose a book that you think you should be reading or you've heard that so many people rave about it, but it might not be up your street, please don't think you have to read it.

This may come as a shock to many book readers, but I have never read Lord of the Rings and I couldn't make it past the first Harry Potter book. When I was younger, I couldn't understand Harry Potter; the language was too detailed for me, I could never picture what was going on in my head and I know that kids younger than me were flying through them again and again. Even when the films came out, I watched a few of them but I simply wasn't interested. For a long time, I felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn't connect to those types of books but years later when I went back to reading, I realised that those genres weren't for me. It wasn't that I wasn't smart or that I was stupid, it just wasn't my cup of tea and that's perfectly okay.

Now when I choose a book, I make sure it's a book that I genuinely want to know more about, and it's partially why I stick to more non-fiction than fiction. I can never truly feel connected to a fiction novel and I prefer the real-life element to a non-fiction read.

Set a time frame that is achievable.

Books are a form of entertainment and we all know that there are billions of books that we will never be able to read in our life time, because there are so many. As much as many of us would be able to read a book in a day or two then move onto the next, sometimes that's just not possible. This is extra important if you're wanting to start up a new reading habit, you have to learn what you can handle and what you have time for.

I started mine up with ten minutes a day, because I knew that was a small percentage of the time I was awake so it would be easy to slot that in, and it was achievable. Once you hit that ten minute mark over a few weeks, you can bump it up to fifteen or twenty minutes. What I normally find happens to me is that I will over exceed the ten minutes and not even realise, which is always a nice surprise. It's always better to start off with something you know you can attain, rather than something that you think might be a challenge, and because if you fall off track one day because you were busier than usual, you might be more likely to think you can't do it anymore.

Set up a tracker for your reading.

Tracking your habits is either something you thrive on or something that you're not interested in, and it's completely fine either way. I personally think you should track it at the very beginning to keep yourself accountable and then once you've built your habit and are able to keep it going, then you might not need to track it as much. However, tracking my habits is something I love to do and I use two different sources.

My daily habit tracker on my Notion has a tick box for every day to "read for ten minutes or more" and it's a simple tick box exercise that will show me over an entire week, how many times that week I read.

My second source is one that is a favourite for many readers, Good Reads. It's like a readers paradise where you can write your own reviews for others to see, you can track your progress with a book and you can see how far through a book you are by entering the page number. You can also keep a list of your own book collection and you have the ability to make your own lists to share public too.

Starting up a new habit especially one for reading, is quite simple and easy, and you can only gain benefits from reading more. I hope these tips were helpful and if you want to see what I'm reading right now, take a look over on my Good Reads.
Have a great day!