“We think we don’t have time to read. We despair of reading anything spiritually rich and substantial because life seems to be lived in snatches. One of the most helpful discoveries
I have made is how much can be read in disciplined blocks of twenty minutes a day.
Suppose that you read slowly, say about 250 words a minute (as I do). This means that in twenty minutes you can read about five thousand words. An average book has about four hundred words to a page.
So you could read about twelve-and-a-half pages in twenty minutes. Suppose you discipline yourself to read a certain authour or topic twenty minutes a day, six days a week, for a year. That would
be 312 times 12.5 pages for a total of 3900 pages. Assume that an average book is 250 pages long. This means that you could read fifteen books like that in one year.
Or take a longer classic like John Calvin’s Institutes (fifteen hundred pages in the Westminster edition). At twenty minutes a day and 250 words a minute and six days a week, you could finish it in
twenty-five weeks. Then Augustine’s The City of God and B.B. Warfield’s Inspiration and Authority of the Bible could be finished before the year’s end.
This astonishing discovery freed me from the paralysis of not starting great, mind-shaping, heart-enriching books because I lacked enough big blocks of time. It turns out that I don’t need long periods
of time in order to read three masterpieces in one year! I need twenty minutes a day, six days a week.”
John Piper – Brothers We Are Not Professionals: pg 66-67
