Reflect on a challenge you faced today and how you overcame it (or plan to).

The challenge I faced today was to find time to read a book. With so many distractions, all thanks to smartphones, it is easy to lose track of time. This is exactly what happened as I did not stick to the plan of reading a book that I have started reading recently. 

I am glad that I chose to read a book after so many days. However, it is definitely not an easy task to carve out time for it. It is not that time is not available. It is about how to manage the time at hand effectively to fit reading time in the schedule. I have started a practice now to start my day with a list of actions for the day. At the end of the day, I just check whether I have ticked all the tasks or not. I have set a target for myself to read 11 pages per day of a book. The number was arrived at by figuring out how many pages need to be read daily in order to finish reading the book this month. Now that I have a fixed number and specific goal to achieve, it becomes easy to stay focused. I did miss reading one day. However, I decided to compensate it by reading double the number of pages the next day. When you look at a book, it does feel overwhelming when you look at the total number of pages that the book holds. However, breaking it down to number of pages to be read per day, it does not seem that intimidating. The problem remains the same, but it was easier to get it addressed when it got broken down into smaller chunks.

This simplistic approach at looking at the problem, helped me overcome the inertia that prevented me from reading books. Earlier, I would get started but struggle to maintain the momentum. Now, I know that reading books is like a marathon and not a 100 metre sprint. You need to pace things well in order to complete the race. Going all out, will only result in abandoning the race mid way.