My goal of reading one book a week didn’t make it that far without a few hiccups. Reading Good to Great took me a day longer than I was expecting and the book I had scheduled to follow that was a pretty big technical book. I was unable to finish reading all of Programming Elixir within the week that I allotted for it.
Poor Planning of a Good Goal
Normally, this would be the point where people would throw in the towel on a New Year’s resolution because they’ve already “failed”, but it shows me that I did a poor job of planning a reasonable goal. I’m not the fastest reader by nature (I subvocalize, and I tend to get distracted and need to re-read passages), so 1 book a week would be fine if I only planned on reading books that we small. That’s not what I’m actually going for, I want to read 52 books in a year. Some books will take me longer than others, and I shouldn’t be concerned by that unless I get to the point where I can’t possibly read 52 books by December 31, 2016.
It’s important to set good goals and the way that I worded my reading goal set me up for failure. If I chose to read something that got me out of my comfort zone there was a good chance it would take longer than a week, so I’m adjusting the wording of my goal to be this:
I will read 52 books in a year, averaging 1 book per week.