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A month ago, I decided to do the impossible. Read The Stand in the bathroom. In one year.

This was exactly the kind of crazy idea that appealed to me.

• It is the longest book I could think of.
• I’ve tried to read it for fun and couldn’t get into it.
• But, in taking advantage of how the brain actually behaves, maybe I could get it done this time.

So, on February 1, I started reading The Stand on the can.

Why this could work

The problem with doing something audacious is always that it is too big. Our brains get scared of messing up. Then we don’t get it done.

Some people are insanely fast readers. Others devour fiction, devoting hours per day. I am neither.

I am a slow, immersive reader. And I refuse to speed read.

And my real trouble as a reader is that I can’t read for long periods. My whole life, I’ve struggled with attention and drowsiness while reading. This made school really hard for me and maintaining a love of literature after it.

So I am the perfect example of a person who wouldn’t get through a 1285-page book in a year, unless that’s the only thing I read all year.

So far, I’m on track to read over 40 books plus The Stand.

Here’s how:

Reading this book doesn’t count.

Reading The Stand doesn’t count as reading. Obviously it does. But for the purposes of my life, I needed to place reading this outside my normal routine. It needed to be something different.

I’m employing three of the tricks one can use to do things we don’t want to do.

1. Tie it to a routine.
2. Track the behavior.
3. Make it as easy as possible.

So, I’m leaving a copy of The Stand in the bathroom and reading it when I’m in there. Then I track my reading in the Beanstack app.

The Ground Rules

To make this work, I needed to set some rules, boundaries, for how to approach the project.

1. I am trying to read this only in the bathroom. This keeps it separate from my regular reading.
2. I gave myself special dispensation at my discretion to read outside of the bathroom if I find myself getting behind.

Setting the Goal

What would it take to read a 1285 page book in a year?

Break it down:

1200+ divided by 12 months is about 100 pages.

100 pages per month is a little over 3 pages per day.

Three pages seems like a normal bathroom reading goal.

But…

I was starting one month into the year and wanted to get it done in the calendar year. How would this effect the goal?

1200+ divided by 11 months is about 110 pages.

That’s about 4 pages per day.

Still doable. But a bit more audacious.

What I’ve learned so far

One month in and I have some really valuable data.

I read 84 pages in the month of February. That’s exactly three pages per day.

This puts me right on track for a twelve-month goal, not my eleven-month goal. So I will need to adjust my habit to get this done.

1. Three pages is about right

Anecdotally, I find that when I’m home most of the day, I have little trouble getting four pages read. It is the days I’m gone most of the day that make reading at that pace difficult.

2. Big books don’t travel

Wanting to make this easy, I needed the book as a book (not on my phone). To make it easy to read, easy to pick up, and easy to keep me from scrolling on my phone.

And this massive book doesn’t come with me to the church, the library, or the hospital. Not if I want room in that bag for anything else…

3. Be loose about tracking

Many habits benefit from rigid tracking. When you take your vitamins, you mark it in your phone so you remember. But I wanted to make the book the instinct, not the phone. So tracking my reading every time I pick up the book wasn’t going to work. It would take me out of the zone (and use up precious time).

I now put the pages read in my phone every few days and just guess at the time spent.

4. It’s time to plan for how to catch up

I gave myself dispensation for catching up if I can’t make the goal. And at my current rate, I won’t be able to. So I have to ask myself:

What is the real priority?

• Reading every page in the calendar year?
• Reading every page in a 365 day-period?
• Hacking my reading to get it done?

If I spend 15 minutes on a Saturday reading two weeks’ worth of missed pages, does this put an asterisk next to the accomplishment? Is the point to have read every word on the toilet? Or is it to read a ridiculous book you’d never read otherwise?

Which is more satisfying?

Let’s be honest. If I read a thousand pages this way, and the other 285 are read from a different throne before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, I’ll live with it.