This past January I took the plunge and bought myself an e-reader. The idea was to have my books, both technical and for fun, always at hand.
Now I have small children, a house, a car, etc etc and don’t make the “big money”. So the outlay of $150 for myself was kind of a big deal.
I remember thinking “is this really worth it?” At about the same time I had begun to really use Trello to manage some small projects around work. (For those not familiar with Trello it’s a free Kanban tool you can use to manage just about anything. You can create an account at Trello.com)
Then it occurred to me, why not use Trello to keep track of my books and see for myself if I really read more?
So that’s what I did. I added books into my To Do including my must reads and recommendations from Twitter (thanks guys/gals). Then I was able to log on via my desktop PC or on the iPhone app to move the books around as I finished them.
Unexpected Results
Oddly enough, I even figured out my “flow” (1 technical book and 1 “for fun” book in my Doing column at a time). I can even glean how long a book took by the moved dates as I dropped them into from Doing into Done.
So this year my goal is to read 60 books and I’m about 12 away.
Judging by my done column on Trello I think it’s safe to say I read much more and in a very productive (to me) way.
