Year of reading under strict control of the goal
Hello! In this small article I want to share with you the results of the year of reading under the strict control of my goal in the form of a small service.
In short, the number of books read increased 17 times compared to the previous year. I wonder how it looks? Let's get started then.
To begin, perhaps, with the fact that just a year and a half ago I was a typical representative of modern Internet youth: I read many articles, blogs, but not books. My brains, formatted by articles, with great difficulty perceived the book, especially the volume of more than three hundred pages.
At one point, my beautiful wife gave me two beautiful books. It was last fall and was the beginning of something interesting and large-scale.
')
Following these two books, I read two more, then three more. It all took me a month. And then in the head a ghostly haze an idea emerged in the spirit of “weak?”, Which at that time I voiced something like this:
“Read 1,500 books with an average volume of 500 pages up to 70 years. Articles and books read before this goal are not considered. ”
Being a person from the IT world, decided to use the gitkhab. Here I will make a small digression. Probably, some people remember an article in Habré in which the author cited the result of a forty-day programmer sprint. At that time, this beautiful commit statistics had already appeared on the githaba and the marked article was decorated with a picture of a green stripe.
Then it inspired me very much, but this time it prompted me a simple way to record the read volume of books. As a pleasant bonus from the point of view of discipline, there was a moment that it was impossible to commit "yesterday".
And I began every day to fix the number of pages read. Over time, commits became overgrown with comments on what I read. And after the book was completed, a small review was added to the commit.
It looked like this:
The inconvenience was that looking at this picture you can see what days I was reading, but how many pages were read. It became clear that it was necessary to use a resource more suitable for my purposes.
Not finding anything satisfying, in a couple of days I wrote my service, which met all my requirements:
1. Visual display of reading progress.
2. Visual display of reading statistics (when I read how much).
3. Related statistics (average read speed, residue tracking, and so on).
4. Simple, user-friendly interface.
Actually what came of it:
Let's see what information can be obtained at a glance:
1. What days did I read books?
2. How many pages I read on the respective days.
Note: if you hover the cursor on a checkbox, then in the pop-up tip there is a specific date and the exact number of pages read.
3. The average number of pages read by day of the week (to the right of the days of the week is a color box corresponding to the number of pages).
In addition, inside the application you can find the same results, which were discussed at the beginning of the article:
As you understand, before that I read an average of 1-2 books a year.
If you look at the themes of the books, among them you will find:
On this, I will finish my story about how a clearly formulated goal, an excellent publishing house, family support and convenient service helped me to read as many books in a year as I had read in the previous 10-15 years.
Read books and thank you for your attention!
UPD:
I answer at once to everyone who thinks that the goal should have included the “interestingness” of books, and not just their number: the fact that the goal will sound “to read 100 interesting books” quantitative assessment will not go anywhere. I am not a robot and not Wang: I do not read everything, but I cannot always predict whether the book is interesting for me (ratings and reviews, as practice shows, not an indicator).
Immediately I answer the question “why is there such a goal?”, A strange question for me: first, it’s fun, secondly, it’s useful.
In short, the number of books read increased 17 times compared to the previous year. I wonder how it looks? Let's get started then.
To begin, perhaps, with the fact that just a year and a half ago I was a typical representative of modern Internet youth: I read many articles, blogs, but not books. My brains, formatted by articles, with great difficulty perceived the book, especially the volume of more than three hundred pages.
At one point, my beautiful wife gave me two beautiful books. It was last fall and was the beginning of something interesting and large-scale.
')
Following these two books, I read two more, then three more. It all took me a month. And then in the head a ghostly haze an idea emerged in the spirit of “weak?”, Which at that time I voiced something like this:
“Read 1,500 books with an average volume of 500 pages up to 70 years. Articles and books read before this goal are not considered. ”
Being a person from the IT world, decided to use the gitkhab. Here I will make a small digression. Probably, some people remember an article in Habré in which the author cited the result of a forty-day programmer sprint. At that time, this beautiful commit statistics had already appeared on the githaba and the marked article was decorated with a picture of a green stripe.
Then it inspired me very much, but this time it prompted me a simple way to record the read volume of books. As a pleasant bonus from the point of view of discipline, there was a moment that it was impossible to commit "yesterday".
And I began every day to fix the number of pages read. Over time, commits became overgrown with comments on what I read. And after the book was completed, a small review was added to the commit.
It looked like this:
The inconvenience was that looking at this picture you can see what days I was reading, but how many pages were read. It became clear that it was necessary to use a resource more suitable for my purposes.
Not finding anything satisfying, in a couple of days I wrote my service, which met all my requirements:
1. Visual display of reading progress.
2. Visual display of reading statistics (when I read how much).
3. Related statistics (average read speed, residue tracking, and so on).
4. Simple, user-friendly interface.
Actually what came of it:
Let's see what information can be obtained at a glance:
1. What days did I read books?
2. How many pages I read on the respective days.
Note: if you hover the cursor on a checkbox, then in the pop-up tip there is a specific date and the exact number of pages read.
3. The average number of pages read by day of the week (to the right of the days of the week is a color box corresponding to the number of pages).
In addition, inside the application you can find the same results, which were discussed at the beginning of the article:
- Read 34 books
- ~ 20 000 pages read (accuracy lovers: 20 314).
- The average reading speed is 58 pages per day.
As you understand, before that I read an average of 1-2 books a year.
If you look at the themes of the books, among them you will find:
- Artistic
- Specialized (economics, statistics, quantum physics, etc.)
- Management
- Programming
On this, I will finish my story about how a clearly formulated goal, an excellent publishing house, family support and convenient service helped me to read as many books in a year as I had read in the previous 10-15 years.
Read books and thank you for your attention!
UPD:
I answer at once to everyone who thinks that the goal should have included the “interestingness” of books, and not just their number: the fact that the goal will sound “to read 100 interesting books” quantitative assessment will not go anywhere. I am not a robot and not Wang: I do not read everything, but I cannot always predict whether the book is interesting for me (ratings and reviews, as practice shows, not an indicator).
Immediately I answer the question “why is there such a goal?”, A strange question for me: first, it’s fun, secondly, it’s useful.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/399913/
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