CJ Mayes

London, United Kingdom

Building Habits With My Kindle

Hi all, I hope you have settled into the new year. The turn of the year often comes with a reflective period. I tweeted at the start of the year a few of my goals which included;
  • 30 mins x 330 days exercise
  • 20 mins x 330 days kindle
  • Run another ultra marathon
  • 1 fitness holiday
  • Grow site and sports youtube content
  • More time with gf & dog  
  • Alcohol free
Some of these things are easy to measure, and some are also harder to track than others. Reading has always been a tough one for me, I just don't enjoy it compared to other things I could be doing with the time, but I also know what great benefits it can bring to my vocabulary, my focus, and my relaxation. So this year, I wanted to make sure I read my kindle as much as possible, (other wise whats the point in paying for kindle unlimited right?) if you'd like a copy of the code written you can find it in the repository at the top of the page. If you're new here, each blog is also replicated in resource on my page. Today we will see how far short of my goal I am, for 20 mins of reading my kindle for 330 days this year. Accessing Amazon Data To begin, export your Amazon purchase history. The specific URL varies by country (e.g., different for Amazon US and Amazon UK). If you're in another country, simply use your local Amazon domain. Once there, select the "Kindle" category and click "Submit Request." Depending on your Kindle usage, it might take several days to receive the download. For me it was overnight. It's worth noting you can actually download a whole bunch of data beyond just kindle from Amazon!
You will end up with a zip file to download. Unzip that folder. There will be about 74 folders within that. Let's take a look at just two for now, book relations and reading session. First lets read in a few files. The ones I think are of value are
  • Content Updates (Mainly because it had the title of the books in, there are other files that also do, but this had the whole list for me) I don't end up using the book name, but it may be useful for your own analysis.
  • ReadingSession - This is the really valuable file as it has the start and end times to all the kindle reads. Start & End times as well as page flips are captured here.
As part of the code i'll do a little clean up too, adding flexibility for renaming columns as well as limiting it just to this years books. We then join those two files together to get a start and end time, the number of pages flipped and the title of the book. You'll see recently the book I read on stoicism. With that light prep we can obviously now start to look at what it means for my goal. There are a few questions i have in mind.
  • Am I reading every day?
  • Am i even reading 20 minutes a night? I don't think I am. I feel like i am rushing my read.
  • I read alot of non fiction.... I tend to just skim read the books, skipping chapters or pages where I already know the concept. How does this impact the page turns a day.
Quickly we see the number of pages flips a day is reasonable.... but it doesnt highlight the days I missed nor gives me a sense of how many pages a day this way. Also what happened on the 16th? Did i just want to mark a book complete? We can add a little more context through filling in the date gaps making it continuous and bringing light to the days i didn't read. Interestingly enough the 3rd of Jan is my birthday... so i'll let myself off. On the 10th Jan I started reading at 3 minutes past midnight. Shame! The chart shows i flip over 40 pages a day. But in truth this will be lower in terms of actual read for two reasons.
  1. The scan reading technique
  2. Flicking back and forth to re read pages.
So let's close and see how truthful my actual reading duration target is. We use the same continuous date range, and roll up the read time each night, excluding days with no read from the average. Okay.... thats not as bad as i thought. 13 minutes on average. It does highlight a few things for me though.
  • I'm doing okay at loading the kindle, I just need to really relax into reading it. It might be worth removing other distractions when I go to read so that I can solely focus on reading.
  • Skim reading is okay, but perhaps I need to go beyond what i normally read around self-help, business, fitness and health to spend more time digesting the information on each page.
Cheers to spending more time building better habits. Some reading is better than no reading.
LOGGING OFF, CJ