October 11, 2016

Trying Something New 10/10/16

I am still trying to combat the fact that I don't feel like reading. But sometimes I think about all I have ahead of me to read, and instead of feeling excited, I feel overwhelmed.

I watched a booktube video by a girl, Giselle Bradley, who was showing how she organizes her reading to get more reading done. Basically, she sets a reading goal for the week in each of the books she's reading. She plans to read x number of pages this week in y book. And z number of pages in b book, etc.

When I first watched her talk about this, I thought, "Why would anyone bother to get that detailed about their reading?" Well, guess what? I'm going to try it.

Now, the last video of hers I watched, she was doing a wrap up of her last week's reading, and she said, "I read x pages in this book, and y pages in that book, and z pages in this other thing, and the total was about 700 pages which works out to about 100 pages a day." A few months ago, a hundred pages a day would have been no big deal, but in my current state of slumpiness, that is not happening.

So here is what I'm looking at. I have two books I'm working on: Slade House and Queen of the Night. Slade House has a dead line. Luckily, it only has 238 pages. So what I did is divide 238 pages by the 14 days I have to read it. It came out to around 17 pages a day. I rounded that up to 20 pages a day. Then I decided I want to be at page 350 of Queen of the Night by next Sunday.

I made a list with the page number I need to reach each day to complete my goal. So each day, I have a goal. It might be 20 pages, it might be 50 pages, but I have broken down my larger goal into smaller daily bites, that are less intimidating. And I made sure to put fewer pages on days when I have a lot to do next week.

We'll see how this works. It has equal potential to be the key to getting me out of my slump and the key to opening up my rebellion against schedules and goals (see also: dumping my TBR) and being a disaster of epic proportions.

Wish me luck!