Shut up and read

I read a lot for work. What I do not do is read, full stop — the kind of reading where you sit with a book and do not produce anything from it. So I stole the name from an old piece of advice and gave myself a rule: one hour a week, no annotations, no screenshots, no highlights, no closing the book to look something up. Just reading.

The hardest part was the phone. I am not allowed to have the phone in the room. The first few weeks I would finish a chapter and reach for it automatically, like a phantom limb. Now I leave it in the kitchen and the muscle memory is starting to fade.

I am three months in. I have read four books, which is two more than I read in the previous six. The strange thing is not the count — it is that I notice more of what I am reading. Without the option to capture, I seem to actually hold it.

This is a seedling. I do not trust it yet. I have had a dozen “reading habits” that lasted six weeks. The thing that gives me a little hope is that the practice is so small it does not feel like a practice — it feels like a permission slip. That is probably why it has survived this long.