One little trick that made me read more books

I’ve been procrastinating a lot about reading more books and I’ve found one little trick, that made me read books again.

My daily dose of reading is consumed on Medium, some local online news sites, and social networks (bad). When I bought my Kindle a few years ago, I used to read one or two books per month, every evening in bed before sleeping. Within the years I subscribed to Netflix and started watching more YouTube videos, which killed my reading habits.

I was only reading on evenings, where I didn’t know what else to do. A few weeks ago I decided to finish a book (House of God, if you’re wondering. It’s good!) I bought and started reading sometime ago. After finishing said book, I started to browse the Amazon app and found out that my favorite authors have published plenty of books I’d love to read, which led me to think about how I could possibly start reading books again:

I need to make this a habit. I want to read a few pages every day.

When I go to bed, I never fall asleep instantly. I start to think about things I could improve my daily life with. Then it hit me: Why would I try to read books on my Kindle, which I always leave next to my bed? Why would I not use my iPhone, which I always have on me?

After waking up the next day, I downloaded the Kindle app to my phone and replaced the Facebook app in the second row on my home screen. My thoughts were: Whenever I had time to kill, I’d open the Facebook app on my phone and scroll through my feed, which is not a good habit as you may know. I was hoping that, because of my previous habit, but also muscle memory, I’d open the Kindle app more often and read a few pages every now and then.

I started doing this about two weeks ago: During that timeframe, I managed to finish two books with over 400 pages each, without spending any time reading in bed. There are so many occasions I can read on my phone, whether it’s on the toilet or while waiting for a friend to pick me up. Turns out, I don’t always have to read in bed.

Amazon really needs to update it’s Kindle app icon. With these changes, I also started to put all my social media apps into a folder, so they don’t get in my way anymore. I want to break the habit of opening these apps once in a while when I’m bored. I’m still trying to figure out which app I should put into my dock as soon as I’m moving Tweetbot. I guess Twitter is not as bad as Facebook, because there’s so much good content I scroll through on there every day.

Now that I’m starting to read more, I’ll have to work on keeping my phone and other devices away from me before going to bed. That’s one of the (bad) habits I have to fix next.