Focusing Your Kindle Reading

Having a Kindle is amazing. Right now I have almost 200 books that I can carry around with me all the time. If I find a new book I’m interested in, all I need is a wifi connection and I can have it in seconds.

I love to read and have a lot of friends that share that passion, so I end up with a lot of great book recommendations. I download a few samples a week and usually buy at least a couple books a month.

I don’t feel bad about buying lots of books, but having a whole library at your fingertips does make it a lot easier to get distracted from the books you are reading. This is something that I’ve struggled with over the past year. I start a book but don’t finish it because I get a new book that I’m more excited about.

Using Freetime to Limit Options

Thanks to this post from Chuck Grimmet, https://medium.com/@cagrimmett/get-the-most-out-of-your-kindle-with-these-4-tools-f7d3c12201fe, I recently discovered the cool features of using Kindle Freetime.

As Chuck talks about in his post, the Freetime feature is great for keeping track of your reading time. But the other thing that is great about Freetime is that it separates your books. You still have all your books, but you have to redownload them into Freetime. That means you can select only a few books at a time as current reads.

In normal mode, I’ve tried to limit myself to only reading three books at a time, but I’ve never been able to follow through. My curiosity about a new book always got the better of me. But with FreeTime mode, I only make my three current modes available. When I started it was Atlas Shrugged, Play Bigger, and Scattered Minds. I’m going to keep one fiction/biography, one business/professional development book, and one person development/philosophy book at a time.

I finished Atlas Shrugged earlier this week, so I added Becoming Steve Jobs.

I’m been reading like this for the past two weeks and I haven’t broken my three book rule once. The extra effort to leave Freetime allows me to catch myself.

The only downside about Freetime is that you have to manually upload your notes and highlights, and can’t auto-sync them, but the trade-off is worth it for me. I get a lot from reading multiple books at once and mixing ideas, but limiting it to three helps me to stick with the books I start and actually finish them.