If you’re a serious reader, you probably have a few intimidating books on your book bucket list. Maybe it’s Ulysses or Moby Dick or Middlemarch or that door stopper of an epic, War and Peace. We might tell ourselves we’ll read those books when life calms down—when work doesn’t have so many deadlines, or the kids are older—and we might. But I think even busy people can make time to read big books now with a thoughtful approach that involves breaking big projects down into tiny chunks.
I first figured this out a few years ago when I decided to tackle War and Peace. I got this idea in my head when Jeremy Anderberg of the Read More Books newsletter wrote that War and Peace had 361 very short chapters. There are, of course, 365 days in a year. Therefore, if you read a chapter a day, you could be done in a year. I pulled my old copy of War and Peace off the shelf and checked. Sure enough, each of the chapters was only about four pages long. I timed myself and I could read a chapter in less than ten minutes. That’s the kind of time that’s findable between Zoom meetings or in the space of time after one kid’s out the door for swimming and another isn’t back yet from karate. So I decided to give it a shot.
Each day feels like just a little more than nothing, but the difference between nothing and a little more than nothing is cumulatively great.
It was such a wonderful experience. Going at such a slow pace, I could read carefully. I felt no need to race through, thus missing little details Tolstoy sprinkled in like wildflowers growing by one of those rutted roads in the Russian countryside. I did not get bogged down in the slower sections, because if a day was a slog, it was only a short slog. If I missed a day, I didn’t have much to catch up on, because it was only a few pages. I delighted in the occasional timely match-ups, like Tolstoy writing of the melting snow and coming spring as I read on a May day, or the deepening cold after the French took Moscow and the weather marched toward winter in my world too. The promise was that if I read a chapter a day I would finish. Time kept passing, and my bookmark kept moving forward, and on December 27, I did.
Having experienced the thrill of finishing something big by breaking it into almost effortless steps, I knew I wanted to feel that giddiness again. So in 2022 I read all the works of Shakespeare. That required reading just 3 pages a day in my 1024-page volume of his complete works. In 2023 I read all the works of Jane Austen, not only Pride and Prejudice, but even Mansfield Park, which I suspect a lot of Austen fans haven’t done. The trials of Fanny Price can be tedious to get through, but if you’re only making yourself read five to ten pages a day, well, you can get through five to ten pages of just about anything. I listened to all the works of Bach at a rate of about 30 minutes a day. This year I’m listening to all of Mozart, mostly as the background music while I’m driving kids around. Small things done repeatedly truly do add up. Each day feels like just a little more than nothing, but the difference between nothing and a little more than nothing is cumulatively great.
So if you have a big book you’d like to tackle, and it doesn’t seem to be happening as part of your normal reading habits, why not see if you can spread the reading over a longer period of time? Ulysses is about 700 pages, so over six months that’s just about four pages a day. At that pace you might even appreciate exactly what Joyce is doing in those stream-of-consciousness parts instead of just skimming.
When we dream big and plan small enough, we move outside the realm of discipline and who is “good” at habits and realize that small things are quite easy to do.
Now I will admit that sometimes it can be hard to stay focused and consistent with a long-term project. People make motivational posters about how a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step, but I don’t think we need motivation for the first step. We’re raring to go for the first step. It’s the 564,876th step that’s more challenging, when the finish line is no where in sight and you may have forgotten why you started. As I was reading War and Peace and Shakespeare I would put my daily reading assignment on my to-do list every day, just so I wouldn’t forget. I found that crossing the daily reading assignment off, as I would any other to-do, was motivational.
But the upside of breaking a big project into very tiny steps is that even if you’re not terribly motivated for each step, it’s such a small step that it just doesn’t matter. When we dream big and plan small enough, we move outside the realm of discipline and who is “good” at habits and realize that small things are quite easy to do. My guess is that you have brushed your teeth every day for the last 361 days, whether you would describe yourself as good at maintaining habits or not. You don’t view toothbrushing as requiring some sort of iron-willed discipline. You probably haven’t thought much about it. You just do it, and throw your toothbrush in your suitcase when you travel rather than try to weasel out of it (“But I’m on vacation!”).
If you’ve brushed your teeth for 361 days, then you can read a short chapter of War and Peace each day. And then you can discover an amazing truth—that putting big things into your life can change the story you tell yourself. If you can read War and Peace then clearly you are not starved for time—as evidenced by the fact that you read War and Peace. No need to dwell on the fact that reading the book took just a few minutes a day. We can write a new narrative of time abundance, and learn to love all the things that big time makes possible.
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Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance by Laura Vanderkam is available from W.W. Norton & Company.
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