Building new habits: read more

Hi Steemers,

As I already told you in one of my last posts, I am currently experimenting with how building new habits works and how they are affecting my life. So far, I presented my new habit of writing, which I try to practice every day and I aim to publish some of my results here, on Steemit. I want to link writing to another habit I want to add to my daily life: reading.

In my entire life, I never read more than when I was a child. Maybe this is, because I didn't use the internet back then... but even if this is the reason, spending time online shouldn't become an activity that compromises my reading time. I wan to read more because it's a great way to expand your horizon. I mostly read psychological or non-fiction books, because I also see it as a way to learn. One says, that you should surround yourself with the people you want to learn from and reading defenitely is a form that comes close enough. By surrounding myself with the thoughts and realizations of selected authors, I defenitely see how I can grow as a person.

How to read more
Knowing myself, I had to find a way to get really serious about this regular reading thing. I highly recomment Goodreads where I publicly committed to participate in this year's reading challenge. My goal is to read 12 books before 2017 ends, aiming to read approximately one book per month. Visualizing my progress and sharing it with the community, helps me to stay committed. You can not only share how you're doing overall, but you can update the progress you're making with every of your current reads which also helps me to try to read, even if only shortly, every day.

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4 tricks to start reading more
I want to share my best tipps, that helped me to become an eager reader again.

1. Read every day
The key is to remain consistent and take this so serious that days during which you don't read will just feel weird. You can schedule fixed times for your reading e.g. right before bed time or just committ to a certain number of paged you want to read per day. To make sure you follow through, print out a monthly calendar and cross every day where you made time to read. It will be harder and harder to break your streak the longer it gets!

2. Bring your books everywhere
Replace scrolling through your facebook feed to watch cat videos (which is a great thing and I of course love to do, too) by reading! When waiting for the bus or for a friend, grab your book and read a few pages. Also, download the book on your phone, so you can bring it everywhere you go! You'll see how much faster you'll finish a book if you choose to do this.

3. Join Goodreads
You should definitely join Goodreads. Create your account, connect with your friends, set up your "currently reading", "read" and "want to read list". Make sure you have a look for what books you would like to read next. Having a plan what you want to do next, will help you by doing what you need to do to get to read the next books (in this case: finish the book you're reading at the moment). The plattform will make you realize how many interesting books are out there and that it's more than worth it to sit down regularly.

4. Talk about the books you're reading
Tell your friends about your current read and committ publicly to this project. By telling not only that you are reading but also what the book is about, you can check how much you actually remember. See the reading more as a process during which you learn about the something you want to teach somebody else afterwards. This is a great way to remember more of what your're reading.

The latter is what I want to do here on steemit. For every book that I'm reading, I'm going to publish a little summary talking about the key takeaways and what to remember from the book. This way I am practising my writing habit, I stay commited to my reading targets and maybe somebody else can benefit from what I believe to be the most important learnings of every of the books I read.