Where Do I Find Time to Read Books?

Posted on 3 mins read

This was the spark for this post..

Some of you may ask - how is it that you find time to actually read a book?

Time is one of the most precious things that we all guard, the thing that we always say that we never have enough of, and we wish that we had more of, so how is that I can spend it reading and even reading long enough to finish a book?

So I have a secret, and I will share it with you all now.

I almost never read a book during the week, it will always be on the weekend.

But - isn’t that the time you spend with your family? Yes it is - but is also the time I spend and invest in myself.

I do have to dive a bit deeper into this though.

Time is something finite, there are only 86400 seconds or 1440 minutes or 24 hours in a day. There is nothing that we can do to change that - but what we can do - is change how we spend that time and what we focus with the time available to us.

You cannot spend all the hours in your day, each and every day awake, it is not possible. You need to sleep, you need to eat, you need to take care of hygiene etc, etc. Own your time during the day, and not let your other things monopolize your time.

Time management is and has always been (and probably will continue to be till the day I die) my biggest challenge. Where and how do I divide my time between, myself, family, work, self improvement, helping others, religion, faith etc. etc. There is no one good way to do this, and this is something that I continously struggle with on a regular basis and try to improve and find the correct balance.

Let’s go back to the book reading.

I wrote a post a good couple of years back VMworld - from a Religious Jewish Orthodox Perspective - and sometimes it happens that I spend Shabbat overseas, not near a Jewish community, in a hotel room.

The great thing about this though is - I have absolutely no distractions, no TV, no phones, no computer, just myself and time to spend.

And what better way to invest some of my time, than by reading a good book. I don’t read novels (or I should say - I hardly do), I read books that are good for me - either professionally or personally. Now I don’t say this is something that might work for you, we have different lifestyles, different beliefs and different priorities, but it is something that allows me to wholeheartedly immerse myself in a subject (or two) and absorb knowledge in an isolated manner.

It usually happens that I spend 1-2 weekends overeseas every year, and that is how I get to reading 3-4 books in a year.

Two of the latest books I just finished were - The Unicorn Project and Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT and I will be posting a review of each of them in upcoming post.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts or comments and what works for you so please feel free to ping me on Twitter.