20100218

New Year's Resolution

Yes, I know its a bit late but I've been busy, and I was reminded of it by an article I stumbled across on Setting a Reading Goal.

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions because experience tells me I'm bad at keeping them and they don't make any difference to what happens in the year. This year is a little different in that I did make a few resolutions, most of them are private. One resolution, however, might as well be public as it might encourage me to stick to it. I resolved to read more.

During 4 weeks last year (our holiday in Costa Rica and the Christmas break) I read more books than I could remember reading in the whole of the rest of the year. I didn't want 2010 to pass with such a poor reading record.

Being a Christian the first thing to do was to resolve to read more of the Bible. I've never read the whole thing so that's part of the resolution; 1 chapter a day and keep a checklist of the chapters I've read. At that rate I should have covered the whole Bible (all 1189 chapters or so) in about 3 and a quarter years (Thursday, 4 April 2013 to be precise).

Having set a chapter target for the Bible I though I might as well do the same for other types, and so I ended up with 3 more categories; work, serious and fun.

So, am I sticking to it? Almost. The results so far (stats courtesy of Google spreadsheets and forms):

BibleWorkFunSerious
Target, chapters per day10.540.5
Target, total to date4924.519624.5
Actual, total to date323230725
Actual, chapters per day0.650.656.270.51
Progress65%131%157%102%
Required year rate1.050.483.650.5
30 day catch up rate1.570.250.30.48
Number of different books4784

2 comments:

undyingking said...

That article really should have been called 'The Ballad of Reading Goal'...

Do you have a clear boundary between Fun and Serious, or is there a de facto grey area?

Phillip Fayers said...

Fun is usually fiction and serious is usually non-fiction - but there is a bit of cross over. I have no hard and fast rule.