I posted back in November that I was doing my own version of 75 booked. I’ll put some of the basics from the first post below, with a few pieces cut out and simplified to explain my reasonings and approach:
It was created originally by emilypaigebooks on Tiktok. As you may have guessed, it’s a spin on the 75 hard or 75 soft fitness challenges that go around every once in a while. I’ve usually had a pretty hard stance against those challenges for a lot of reasons, primarily because I think you should always strive for progress over perfection. Any challenge that you have to start over when you “fail” doesn’t actually set you up for developing habits or living a “healthier” life in the long run. You get frustrated and quit and never make any progress on your goals. This is mostly the case for those challenges about working out, fitness, and/or dieting.
However, 75 booked caught my attention because I REALLY need to get going and finish my reading challenge. I started it right before a work trip where I literally did not actually have a spare moment to read (I promise, I truly did not) so I decided to actually start it when I got home and could settle in for the next 75 days. I also reduced some of the goals (two 45 minute sessions felt daunting to me and I decided to go down to 30 minutes to ensure I’d actually do it… progress, not perfection!).
My goals were: read for 30 minutes (not in bed), read for 30 minutes (anywhere), drink two cups or vessels of water, complete a book buying ban, and track my reading sessions.
Here is how I fared with each of my goals. I will say that I definitely PASSED this challenge, with a few tweaks or cheats that I think still count, if you ask me. Here are each of the goals and how I achieved them or feel about my progress there.
Read 30 minutes + Read 30 minutes – not in bed
Lumping these two together. I really wanted to read for 60 minutes a day and just tried to not leave it all for 10pm on my Kindle when I got in bed. I generally achieved these goals, with a few exceptions. I think there were a few days where I read for like 20 minutes in the basement when watching TV and ~40 minutes in bed, but I don’t really care much about that discrepancy. There were plenty of times I read for the entire 60 minutes downstairs or in the car, etc. and kind of made up for it.
Along those same lines, there were probably a total of 5 times during the challenge where I didn’t read 60 minutes within one day, but I read far more than 420 hours in the week. I had a couple times where I was too tired at night or had all-day plans and I couldn’t read all 60 minutes, but I only did that if I had read for 120 minutes or more another day within the week. Almost like I just needed to read 420 hours per week as my goal and it didn’t matter how or when I achieved it. This was NOT always my approach; like I said, it happened a few times at most, but I allowed it for my sanity. I also never did this ahead of time, if that makes sense – if I couldn’t read 60 minutes on Thursday but read 120+ minutes on Monday, I would allow myself to not read. I read plenty another day to make up for it already. I wouldn’t plan ahead to read more on Friday because I blew it Thursday.
Book buying ban
I didn’t buy books with my own money necessarily, but again a few tweaks. I got a $50 Amazon gift card for Christmas but obviously did not buy books from Amazon, which was the intention. For my January BOTM box, I did two add-on books equating to $16.99, so I chalked it up to buying those books “with a gift card.” I was also thinking I could skip my February BOTM if I want to make up for it a little bit? We’ll see. I selected my Aardvark book as well, which I was allowed to do per the challenge. I preordered books from B&N during their preorder sale but (a) those are charged when the books ship, not at the time of purchase and (b) none of them come out during the challenge. I won’t be paying for those books until after the challenge, with April as the earliest release date. I was so happy this challenge ended when it did because I RSVPed to a Galentines event at my favorite local bookstore and knew I’d be buying things then! Overall, really proud I didn’t break the book buying ban. It was a good time of year for it.
Track reading sessions
I definitely did this one! I used Bookly every time I read. There was a time or two I added the session manually in the tracker app after the session but that fully counts still. I don’t love tracking my books like this because I’d have to start and stop the timer all the time if Chris talked with me or while I was driving listening to an audiobook. It was hard to do during the choose your own adventure book I read so I ended up tracking the time I spent reading, how much I read during each session, and then figured out the percentages per session to update it. I made it work!
Drink two “glasses” of water per day
I was more cognizant of drinking water during this challenge for sure. I started keeping one bottle upstairs and one downstairs so I could always have one nearby. As I said, I wasn’t going to police the number of glasses specifically but I definitely drank more water out to dinner than usual, drank my bottles during the day and at night, etc. This was a success.
Purpose and Goal ✅
I’m really pleased with myself for completing this challenge and not cheating as much as I wanted to. The total number of hours read during this was 93 hours and 41 minutes, which averages to 108 minutes per day. My goal was to read 60 minutes per day or 420+ each week, especially if there were a few days I didn’t read the full amount. I definitely succeeded in this. I finished 31 books, which included around 11 novellas or shorter stories, 1 graphic novel, and 19 full-length books.
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