I am a big believer in reading. I think it’s especially important in this fast-paced information age. This is even more so for entrepreneurs, marketing managers, and business owners who need to keep up to date with the fast-paced world of digital marketing. There is just so much to read, so many opinions, and so many conflicting views, that the content marketing-led world of online articles is not always as helpful as it can be.
Actually sitting down and concentrating on a book rather than flitting from social updates to articles and simply introducing more confusion is just so important to help develop a good sense of concentration. The fact is, you can easily lose a day to this digital hamster wheel without ever really concentrating on the task at hand.
Who Has Time To Read Though?
Who has the time to read, though? There may not be as many important books as there are blog posts, but there is still a huge amount of tried and tested marketing literature out there to get through. So much so that it often feels overwhelming. You can’t read a hundred books at once. However, you can read a book every ten days (or two weeks if you want to take weekends off business reading you slackers) with this simple and hugely effective strategy.
The 10% Method For Reading More Books
The strategy itself is simple – you read 10% of the book each day.
That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
But let me give you an example. I am trying to improve all our own processes. To do this we are looking at agile/lean project management methodologies so I am reading the Scrum book. This book is 238 pages long. To use the 10% strategy, I just have to read 23.8 pages per day. Let’s round that up to 24 for good measure. I am sure you can manage 24 pages per day, right?
And this is the secret here. All big jobs are simply a series of smaller jobs. By breaking the task up into smaller, more manageable parts, we can easily knock this book down in 10 days. We are talking 15 minutes a day. You can do 15 minutes. You can do it on your commute, you can do it during a break at work. It’s doable. That’s the point.
There is so much to learn and this is a simple and actionable way to read more – you and your business will only benefit from doing so.
