Timebox to read (1 of 5)
You can read lots in very little time
I ran an online Timeboxing session for over 350 people from AstraZeneca on Monday. At least 100 of them signed up here. So, welcome!
If your organisation might be interested in a 60-minute session on this delectable topic, just temm me by replying to this email.
MR ELF didn’t make it into the book but it’s a handy mnemonic. It stands for:
Meditation
Reading
Exercise
Learning
Friends
Each of these are uncontroversially good ways to use time. The memory aid (which is very effective - people just don’t forget this) is helpful when you’re planning timeboxes and considering which activities to add to your calendar. But even if you don’t timebox at all, it’s useful in those situations where you suddenly have some time on your hands — the train you’re on is delayed, your evening plans get cancelled, you’re going to be on hold on a call for 30 minutes. Pick one of these activities and guarantee good use of your time.
Each week, for the next five, I’ll focus on one of these activities.
We’re starting with Reading. The book’s out now and it’s also in my interests to encourage this particular activity. Many early readers have kindly left reviews on Amazon, LinkedIn and elsewhere.
Few people complain that they read too much. But many of us berate ourselves for reading too little. (In fact, this too-much-too-little diagnosis applies to all five MR ELF activities).
With reading in particular, many people have a pile of bought books which they add to faster than they get through.
But reading a book doesn’t actually take very long. The trick is to…just start reading. My book, Timeboxing, for example, is 45k words. The average reading speed is 200 words a minute. That means you could read it all in less than four hours - just 30 minutes of concerted (timeboxed, ideally) reading for one single week. That’s not a huge ask. Ditto plenty of other works — here are the word counts of famous titles:
Hamlet — 30k — 3 hours
L’Etranger — 36k — 3.5 hours
The Color Purple — 67k — 6 hours
Cry, The Beloved Country — 84k — 8 hours
Brave New World — 84k — 8 hours
Animal Farm — 30k — 3 hours
I made the point explicitly in Timeboxing by including a word count and estimated reading time at the start of each chapter. Most chapters can be read in less than 10 minutes. Just 10.
It made sense for me to include that feature in a book about timeboxing. But the principle (that a meaningful chunk of writing can be read in small pockets of time) applies to any book, or play, or scientific paper, or epic poem, or feature article.
Timeboxing makes reading easy.
And reading Timeboxing makes timeboxing easy.
So box some time (now — right now) to read a chapter or two of that book you know you should read.
