SDS 560: Daily Habit #7: Read Two Pages

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At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits I espouse and that theme continues today. The habits we covered in January and February were my morning habits, specifically: Starting the day with a glass of water; Making my bed; Carrying out alternate-nostril breathing; Meditating and Writing morning pages.

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Now, we’ll continue on with habits that extend beyond just my morning with a block of habits on intellectual stimulation and productivity. Specifically, today’s habit is “reading two pages”.

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Along with conversation and reflection, reading is one of the three key ways you can expand the boundaries of your mind. With non-fiction this is obvious, especially in a field like data science or software engineering where we can use reading to learn new hard skills such as machine learning and programming best practices. Even fiction, however, enables us to hone our capacity to understand language, to visualize, and to empathize with others’ minds.

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In short, reading is freaking awesome. So, if I think reading is so incredible, why do I set such a low daily-habit bar of reading just two pages per day? Well, the trick — as with any good habit you’re trying to encourage — is to make it as easy as possible to perform every single day. If I set the goal of reading, say, a chapter of a book each day, this could become intimidating or unsustainable and then the habit could collapse. Instead, it’s approachable and sustainable to find the time to read at least two pages every single day.

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For example, if you have a book easily accessible on your phone, then you could find time to read two pages a day even while you use the washroom. Several years ago, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone and started reading novels whenever I had a few moments to spare — be it while going to the washroom, while in the elevator, or during my short subway commute to work. My goal was only to read two pages a day, but these little moments added up and I would find myself engaged in the story such that some days I’d be immersed in reading for hours instead of wasting time, say, watching TV.

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So, set an easy goal like reading at least two pages, let the habit build on itself, and eventually you can find yourself immersed in the good habit, almost effortlessly going through several books a year.

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Like the habits I’ve already covered in my Five-Minute Friday episodes on my daily habits, I choose to log “reading two pages” as a binary habit — either I read at least two pages on a given day or I didn’t — so using the habit-tracking template I introduced in Episode #538, I set the min column for this “reading two pages” row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. An alternative approach could be to log, say, how many pages you actually read on a given day — this might gently nudge you in the direction of reading more each day — but I choose to keep it as simple as possible for myself with a binary flag and a low number-of-pages bar to clear.

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Finally, if you happen to be looking for something to read to get you started on a reading habit, you can check out Episode #470 in which I recap my favorite works of both fiction and non-fiction. And if you’re familiar with guest episodes on the show, you’ll be aware that we end almost every episode by asking the guest for a book recommendation. For your convenience, we’ve collated these recommendations for you in the SuperDataScience Podcast Virtual Library, which you can access for free at www.superdatascience.com/books. That’s www.superdatascience.com/books.
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All right, enjoy! That’s it for today’s episode. I’m looking forward to catching you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.