I recently had a conversation with somebody (a few people actually) about howmuch time I have to put in to read as much as I do. The short answer is, a lot.The longer answer is that it really depends on the individual and how you wantto approach your reading goal.
First thing you have to figure out is how you want to attack things. One method,which my buddy Justin used to swear by is simply putting in the time.Every day he would read 30 minutes. For him this was roughly 15 pages per day.
Speaking of pages, another approach would be to read a certain number of pagesper day. My wife mentioned reading chapters, but unlike pages, not every bookhas chapters.
For me, nothing beats trying to knock out a percentage of a book per day. It’seasy to track on an e-reader and it scales across books. Every book can bebroken down into 10% chunks, regardless of size.
Obviously, these metrics really depend on your personal reading speed, thenumber and size of pages in the book and even the font size per page! For thesake of this calculator, I’m defaulting to the average adult reading speed of200 WPM (find your reading speed here), an average of 250 words perpage and an average book length of 350 pages.
As previously mentioned, this all came up because of some choice conversationsover the last month or so. One conversation that really stuck out to me was oneabout how reading 10 books would be a huge milestone. I thought, what if webroke that down into manageable daily chunks? Turns out if you read a littleless than 12 minutes a day, you could realistically knock out ten 350 page booksin the next year!
So have at it, see what kinds of reading goals you can accomplish this year!
Reading speed (WPM) |
Words per page |
Pages per book |
Minutes per day |
Pages per day |
Percentage per day |
Number of days |
Books |
To calculate finished audio durations, work out your reading speed for the script in question and apply that directly to the calculator, for example 240 words per minute. If you don't know your reading speed, use the second calculator! As a general rule, you will need to practice technique at 3x the speed of your ultimate target reading speed. Thus, if you currently read at 300 wpm and your target reading speed is 900 wpm, you will need to practice technique at 1,800 words-per-minute, or 6 pages per minute (10 seconds per page).
Got your plan? Ready to kill it? Why not Treat. Yo. Self. to a new bookto start things off?