One book a week: simple goals signal purpose

A few weeks ago, I was intrigued to receive an email at work headed ‘One-Book-A-Week is back! Sign up now!’. It came to me (and everyone else at Google who subscribes to a mailing list of productivity tips) from a colleague who was inviting us to pledge to try to read at least one book a week from April to June. We could do it as a team or we could do it individually. There were no prizes for succeeding or penalties for failing - but there was a page to log our books read, a regular email to encourage us and to tell us how we were doing as a group, and a bingo card of different types of books (a novel, a business book, a book by an author we hadn’t read before, a book we had been meaning to read) which we could optionally aim to complete.

I like reading, so I signed up, and pledged to read 13 books during the challenge. Four weeks in I have learnt a few things.