Reading 4 Hours a Day, Every Day, for 1 Week
As the title already suggests, this is a post about my experience with reading for four hours, every day, for one week. It was easy at times, stressful at others, but all around the result, in the end, was notable. I’ll be talking about how the experience went, my pitfalls and struggles, and finally how I’m feeling now that this little experiment is over! This is a post that I think works best in video form, since I did document every day and reading session, but if you’re in a hurry, the post will work just fine. The video is linked below!
Purpose of the Experiment
A few weeks ago, I made a post offering advice for reading more. It was all stuff that I had found was working for me, but the truth is that I was having a hard time committing to all of those suggestions consistently. In particular, I struggled with reading endurance. Changing scenery and medium helped with this, but what I really needed was training. My reading muscles aren’t what they used to be and, like any muscle, need training. That’s what this experiment was: training.
I told myself that no matter what—regardless of sleep, projects, and work—I was going to read for four hours every day. I was going to persevere, read my book, and retrain my reading muscles. My hope was that, by the end of this experiment, I would have more reading endurance and would be closer to the tier of reader that I was so long ago.
By long ago, I mean… like a couple of years or so.
What Did I Read
For this experiment, I read John Gwynne’s Ruin, the review for which came out not too long ago. I managed to finish it before the experiment ended, so I spent the last day of the week-long experiment reading the fourth and final novel in the series, Wrath. Ruin is the longest book I’ve read since Pierce Brown’s Dark Age, so it was a good way to test my reading endurance. If you’ve seen my review for Ruin, you likely know that I also greatly enjoyed the book, so what better story to read while I’m trying to retrain myself to have greater reading endurance?
Pitfalls of the Experiment
This absolutely did not go smoothly. This week-long experiment happened to fall on the same week that my normal person job was absolutely exhausting. If you don’t know, I support the Zoom Events platform, specifically for overseas clients, so I work late at night. Usually, it’s smooth sailing, if a little frustrating at times, but the week I did this experiment was terrible. I was absolutely swamped. By the end of most of my shifts, I just wanted to put my sleep mask on and pass out in my bed. Instead, though, I went to bed and read for several hours, fighting off sleepiness all the while.
I wasn’t always successful in this. Some nights I would get to about three hours or a little beyond and realize that I simply could not stay awake any longer! A few of those nights were extremely rough. I tried to make up the missing hours later but wasn’t always successful. Work was just draining that week. It was bad timing all around, but I persevered to the best of my ability.
Results
But what’s most important here is the result of all this reading. I powered through, did the reading ‘til I passed out every night, and now I need to look at how I feel about the experiment overall (and whether or not it really did help with my reading endurance). Interestingly, I don’t think that it helped all that much with my endurance for reading, but it did help with my reading speed. I may need to do this for a longer period of time to train up my endurance, but I did get an unintended side effect: I found myself reading faster.
I mentioned in my reading tips video that when I was younger, I knew how to scan a page quickly and effectively. I didn’t pronounce every single word in my head when I was reading. Learning how to do this again is a key way to regain your original reading rate if you’ve been in a slump for an extended period of time, as I have been. I thought that I was pretty much back to that speed already, but after this experiment, I’ve noticed my reading speed has accelerated considerably. My TBR feels much more manageable as a result.
So, while my reading endurance didn’t improve, which was the original goal of this week-long reading experiment, I did get a separate benefit! During the course of this project, I found my footing with reading again and increased by reading rate considerably. Now, I didn’t track specific numbers—maybe I should have, but hey, I’m not a scientist—so this is mainly going off feeling and such, but I have definitely noticed a change in the speed at which I’m reading. It’d be great if I could quantify that change, but that sounds hard and I already do stuff that’s hard all the time.
Don’t read too much into that.
Conclusion
After this weeklong experiment, I find that I am reading more. I’m not reading for four hours a day, which I’d like to be able to do, but I’m pretty close to that. Now that the experiment is over, I’m prioritizing sleep more than I was before, so if I have a rough day of work, I go to bed early. Still, I’m finding time to read. Most importantly, when I do read, I’m reading a lot and at a much faster pace than I was when I started the experiment. It’s good to know that I’ve been able to recapture that skill with reading. Hopefully, the reading endurance will return to me with time.