Quantifying and Time Tracking My Reading
2020-03-27
Tracking progress, in general

I like measuring progress. I’m better at staying focused and motivated if I can quantify my rate of progression when working towards goals.

I first figured this out in high school. One of my friends introduced me to the practice of writing down my exercise sets and reps at the gym. Before this, my approach to working out was: go to the gym, do a bunch of random stuff for a while, repeat. I didn’t plan ahead what exercises I would perform or how much weight or how many reps I would try to lift, and I didn’t measure how much I lifted at each session. I had no idea if I was getting stronger or just treading water. I started bringing a notebook and a pen with me to the gym. I planned out 5 different workouts, each focusing on different body areas, and rotated through them. I wrote down how many sets and how many reps at what weight I was able to do for each exercise, and each time I went to the gym I’d try to lift slightly more than I was able to the previous time. The gain in efficiency was substantial. Every time I went to the gym I had a plan for what workouts and sets to perform; no more randomly picking exercises. It was great to be able to flip through the notebook and actually observe progression.

In 2020 I’m still measuring and planning, except instead of a notebook I’m using the iOS app strong which basically does the same thing, except it has all the goodness of being 21st century software like cloud storage and progress analytics.

Tracking reading progress

I tend to think of reading and comprehending books on technical topics as another form of “working out.” The strain is on my neural networks’ ability to form connections rather than my muscle fibers’ ability to contract. I’ve ported the same progress measuring approach from the gym to my reading.

A few months ago I bought a dozen or so technical books and I’m diligently working through all of them. Books are underrated. Many of the topics covered in books could probably be learned through reading a series of online blog posts (I’m very confident I’ve learned more from blog posts than college), but books have the advantage of pulling together a lot of information and organizing it for more efficient learning. Also, you can flex your reading accomplishments with physical books by creating an awesome looking bookshelf. My apartment benefits from the added color.

Like in the gym, measuring and tracking reading progress has benefits for focus and motivation. When you actually track your reading progress you go from some impalpable, unquantifiable sense of progress to knowing things like: I read #x amount over the last 5 days, with #y pages per day and at this rate it will take me #z days to finish this book. You get a little dopamine hit from quantifiable achievement.

I’m currently reading Fullstack React. I decided to break the book up into segments of 10 pages; you can think of these as being akin to gym “sets.” I record the start and finish time of each set as I read. I started out just jotting down measurements on paper; eventually I transitioned to using a spreadsheet.

My Spreadsheet on Google Docs

Columns A through F are my page block (~“reps”) tracking input area. For each block of 10 pages I read I input A the date, B block start, C Block end, D start time, E end time and the duration F is automatically calculated.

Just as a nice visual aid, I apply alternating colors to the A column rows by date with using a conditional formating formula. The formula applies the green color depending on whether the day of the month is even or odd (this means if I were to skip a day the alternation would be a little messed up).

=and(iseven(day(A2)),isblank(A2)=false)

The fun part of having this data in a tabular format is you can write queries on it to get analytics. Google Sheets has its own flavor of SQL which is similar enough to “real” databases like MySQL. You can write queries that use aggregator functions and SQL statements like GROUP BY to find out stats like, how much total time per day spent reading, average time per block per day, total number of blocks per day, etc. Unfortunately, Google Sheet’s aggregator functions MAX, SUM and AVG don’t work with non-numeric values like time durations, so I came up with a bit of a workaround by converting all of the duration values in column F into seconds in column G (which I’ve hidden). I then ran a query using column G.

The values in column G are the values in the “duration” column F converted to seconds displayed as an integer using this function:

=if(ISBLANK(F3),” “,F3*24*3600)
Multiplying the value in F converts the duration to float representation of the fraction of 1 day, so 0:30:00 minutes becomes 0.5/24=0.02083333333. Multiplying by 24*3600 converts to seconds.

Columns I through L display the output of the following query:

=QUERY(A3:G, “SELECT A, (AVG(G)/86400), (SUM(G)/86400), (MAX©-MIN(B)) GROUP BY A LABEL A ‘Date’, (AVG(G)/86400) ‘Average Time/Block’, (SUM(G)/86400) ‘Total Time’, (MAX©-MIN(B)) ‘Total Pages’”)

Now as I input my reading progress, I can get a sense for how well I’m doing each day relative to other days.

By using the output of the previous query I can get a few more stats, such as total days, total time, etc. In my sheet I’ve placed these in columns M and N.

Total Days:
=count(unique(A2:A100))
Total Time:
=SUM(F2:F)
Total Average Time/Block:
=AVERAGE(F2:F)
Average Total Time/Day:
=N4/counta(unique(A2:A100))
Average Pages/Day:
=FLOOR(SUM(L:L)/counta(unique(A2:A100)))
Extrapolated Days Remaining:
=ROUND((N2-MAX(C:C))/N7,2)
Extrapolated Completion Date:
=MAX(A:A) + CEILING(N8)

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