Do you wish that you could read more in a shorter amount of time?
Or maybe you just want to find a way to commit to finishing that next book that you pick up.
Well, today I want to show you a very simple trick to help you do just that.
I'm currently in the middle of reading this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear and I'm really enjoying it, however, because I borrowed this book from my local library, I need to complete it within the next two weeks.
Well, I'm going to do that with the help of this little bookmark, which I create for almost all of my books.
I'm gonna show you what it is, and how you can create it for yourself in just a few minutes.
So, let's dive in.
To make sure that I can finish a book within a specific timeframe, I take just a couple of minutes to create a reading chart, or a reading guide, to make sure I can hit that specific deadline.
Now, you can do this in any type of spreadsheet tool.
Here, I'm within Google Sheets, but you can use this in Microsoft Excel, or almost any other spreadsheet tool.
Now, the very first column, we're gonna create a date column here.
So, I'm just gonna call this date.
Let me just type that in here, date.
The next column we're gonna call day, because I do find it helpful to see the day of the week.
And then, this last one, I'm gonna call page min, as in page minimum.
This is gonna be the minimum page number I need to read to in order to reach my goal.
So, over here in the date field, I'm gonna type in today's date, which happens to be 2019.
It is May the 14th and I'm gonna put it in this date format.
This is usually what spreadsheets like the best.
It's easiest to work with.
And then, if I select this cell, you'll notice in the lower right-hand corner there's a small square or a small dot.
If you click and hold and then drag this down, I'm gonna drag it down 14 cells, because I wanna finish this in two weeks, and let go, you can see that it will automatically increment each date.
And even if I was to go over the month of May, it would successfully know the date and keep going onward.
So, this is gonna be helpful to keep me on track, but I find it's also helpful sometimes to know the day of the week.
So, today is Tuesday, I'm gonna put in Tue, just an abbreviation of Tuesday.
And then I'm gonna do the exact same thing.
I'm gonna click and hold on this little dot here and I'm gonna drag it all the way down and release, and again, now I've got my days of the week.
Now, I'm gonna clean this up just a little bit.
I'm gonna select this cell and I'm actually going to center it, just so it's not right up against the date.
And how about, actually, I take our headers here and I'm gonna bold that, just so they stand out a little bit more.
Now, the last one is crucial.
This is the minimum page number I need to be on in order to reach my goal.
But, in order to do this, we just need to do a little bit of simple math.
I'm gonna go over about two cells and just so you can see what I'm doing, I don't usually put in the title or the name here, but I have 256 pages in the current book that I'm reading.
And, so the next one I'm gonna put down below is the pages per day.
Again, I don't usually do this, but I just wanna type this in so you know exactly what these numbers represent.
So, here's the total number of pages here.
In the cell down below, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select the equals sign, because I'm gonna put in a very simple formula.
I'm gonna say equals, I'm gonna select the cell above, which is my total number of pages, and I'm gonna say divided by 14, right?
'Cause that's exactly two weeks.
I'm gonna hit enter and it's gonna give me this number.
18.2857 so on and so on.
Now, that's a bit of a messy number, but don't worry.
We're not gonna have decimals over here in our page minimum.
So, we're gonna go back to this page minimum column and we're gonna use this cell.
We're gonna use this number.
So, in the very first cell, on day one, I'm gonna put in another formula, a very simple one.
I'm gonna put equals and I'm just gonna reference that cell, okay?
I'm just gonna reference that cell over here and I'm gonna hit enter, so now we've got that number over here.
But, you know what?
I hate how this is gonna look, right?
We don't want all of these decimal places.
I'm not gonna read like, you know, one-third of a page, of page 19 in this case.
Let's keep it nice and clean.
So, if I select this particular column here I can go up here and you can decrease the decimal places.
So, I'm gonna do this, it's not only gonna do it for the number that I have in there, but any future number, it's gonna remove the decimals as well.
So, on day one I just need to make sure that I've read about 18 pages.
Now, the only thing I have to do next, well, there's two quick steps.
I'm gonna go down to the second cell and we're gonna type in another formula.
We're gonna say equals, and we wanna start with the 18, right?
So, I'm gonna say equals this.
I could really either reference the one above or, actually, sorry, I have to reference this one because it's gonna follow it all the way down, so I'm gonna say equals, I'm gonna select this cell and then you need to select F4 on your computer and what you wanna do, is you wanna hit it two times so you get that dollar sign in front of the cell.
That means it's gonna follow that cell all the way down, because we're gonna start adding pages on top of one another.
I'm gonna select plus because we're gonna add something to it.
And what we're gonna add is this number over here, right?
We're gonna add our 18 number over here.
I'm gonna select this, but we also wanna hit F4 again.
This time we're gonna hit it just once, where we get that double dollar sign amongst the, in front of the cell and in between the cell so that we are always adding this number, all right?
So, we've got our dollar sign C2, plus dollar F dollar three and I'm gonna hit enter.
So, it looks pretty simple, and you know, you might be saying why did you put in that complicated formula, or for those who are more advanced in Excel, it's not a very complicated formula.
This is basically just doubling that, right?
And because there's decimal places that's why it's not exactly doubled.
It's 37 instead of 36, well, this is the reason why.
Now, just like we did with the day and the date field, I wanna come here, I wanna select this little dot and I'm gonna drag it all the way down to my last day.
And look at that!
It happens to add up precisely to 256 pages.
So, now, I can print off this little guide.
I could have a digital copy as well, but I like it as a bookmark, especially when I'm reading a physical book.
Now, as I go through, and let's say I get to this coming Sunday.
I can glance at my bookmark and say, I need to read to at least page 110 in order to stay on pace, in order to stay on track to reaching my goal.
If I'm behind, maybe I'll need to read a few extra chapters or a few extra pages.
If I'm ahead, well, who cares, right?
If I finish the book early that's great.
But I find this has been a very, very useful tool to make sure that I finish a book within a particular timeframe and, in many cases, just read a book faster.
Even if there's not a due date, even if I don't have to return it to my library.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today's video and I hope that you're getting in as much reading as you would like.
I credit a lot of my expertise and really a lot of the joy in this life to reading a variety of books.
I'd love to hear your input and your feedback on today's video and any other tips that you may have in enjoying reading more frequently.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you give this video a thumbs up and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity Channel.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
