Not a hundred. Not a chapter. Just ten pages. And a cup of coffee to sit with while I read them.
People ask me sometimes how I write as often as I do. How the ideas keep coming. How a blog about coffee manages to find new things to say about something as simple as a cup.
The honest answer is ten pages a day.
Not ten pages of research. Not ten pages of anything specific or improving or professionally relevant. Just ten pages of whatever book I’m currently reading — chosen because I wanted to read it, read at whatever pace the page demands, with no goal beyond reaching page ten before I close it and go on with the rest of the day.
I started this a little over a year ago. I want to tell you exactly what it did to me, because it did more than I expected, and not always in the ways I expected.
How it started — which is to say, with a problem
The problem was this: I had stopped reading.
Not dramatically, not all at once — the way most good habits die, which is gradually and without announcement. The books were still there. The intention was always present. But somewhere in the past few years, the reading time had been colonised by other things — the phone, the scroll, the endless availability of something easier than a page that required sustained attention.
I’d pick up a book, read three pages, check something on my phone, lose the thread, put the book down. Try again the next day. Same result. The books I’d been meaning to read sat on the shelf doing the thing unread books do, which is make you feel vaguely guilty every time you walk past them.
Then I read something — I can’t remember where, which is slightly ironic — about the mathematics of ten pages a day. Ten pages daily is roughly 3,650 pages a year. At an average of 250 pages per book, that’s roughly fourteen or fifteen books a year, read consistently, without ever spending more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch.
Fifteen minutes. I was spending more than that staring at nothing in particular on my phone before I’d even gotten out of bed.
The problem wasn’t time. It was never time. It was the decision to spend that time on something that required more of me than a scroll did.
The rule — which is really just one rule
Ten pages. Every day. No exceptions negotiated in advance.
Not “at least ten pages” — which sounds more ambitious but actually creates pressure that makes the habit fragile. Just ten. Exactly ten, on the difficult days. More than ten, freely, on the days when the book won’t let you stop at the bottom of a page.
The only other rule: it happens with the coffee. Not after the coffee, not before the coffee — with the coffee. The two things together, every morning, until they became inseparable enough that making the cup automatically created the desire to open the book.
That pairing is the mechanism. It’s why the habit held when other reading habits I’d tried before hadn’t. The coffee was already non-negotiable. Attaching the reading to it borrowed that certainty.
What ten pages actually feels like
Some mornings, ten pages takes eleven minutes. The prose is fast, the story is pulling, and I barely notice the pages turning.
Some mornings, ten pages takes twenty-five. The book is making me think — stopping me at the end of a paragraph to sit with something, look out the window, let the idea settle before I continue. These are the best mornings, even when they’re the slowest.
What ten pages never feels like: a chore. The limit is part of what protects it. Because I know it ends at ten pages, I never approach the book with the low-grade dread of something open-ended. It’s contained. It’s manageable. And in that manageability, it stays something I want to do rather than something I’m trying to get through.
What it did to the rest of my day
Here’s what I didn’t expect, and what turned out to be the most significant effect of the habit: the quality of my thinking changed.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. But over months, something shifted in how ideas arrived and how long they stayed and how they connected to other ideas. The reading was putting things in my head — images, arguments, ways of seeing — that then quietly cross-pollinated with everything else I was thinking about.
A passage in a book about Japanese craft philosophy showed up, three weeks later, in how I was thinking about making coffee. A novel I’d read purely for pleasure gave me a structural insight about how I was organising a post. A short book about grief handed me a sentence I’ve returned to a dozen times when I’ve been trying to understand something happening in my own life.
None of this was planned. I wasn’t reading for content. I was reading because I wanted to, ten pages at a time, with my morning coffee. The cross-pollination happened on its own.
This is what reading does that scrolling doesn’t. Scrolling is input without retention — information that arrives fast and leaves faster. Reading at the pace of a page is slow enough that things stick. The ideas have time to find a place to live before the next idea arrives.
What it did to this blog
I’ll be direct about this because it feels like the most honest thing I can say about the habit.
Before I started reading ten pages a day, the blog was thinner. The writing was fine — my voice was there, the honesty was there — but the ideas were shallower. I was writing mostly from immediate experience and observation, which is good as far as it goes but doesn’t go very far.
After a year of reading ten pages a day, the blog has more to say. The posts that I’m most proud of — the one about Before the Coffee Gets Cold, the Mars post, the letter to my twenty-year-old self — all of them carry something that came from a book. Not a quoted passage. Not a reference. Just a way of thinking about something that I wouldn’t have had access to without the reading.
Reading makes writing better. I knew this before. I understand it now in my body rather than just my head.
What I’m reading right now
I try not to be prescriptive about this because the ten-pages habit works best when the book is one you actually want to read, not one you feel you should read.
Right now I’m reading a novel I picked up because of a recommendation from a stranger in a café — exactly the kind of discovery the habit has made more possible, because reading ten pages a day makes you someone who talks about books naturally, and people respond to that by telling you what they’re reading.
Before this one, I read a short book about the philosophy of time that I can’t stop thinking about. Before that, a memoir that made me want to write better. Before that, a coffee origin story about Ethiopian farming families that changed what I tasted in my morning cup for weeks afterward.
Fourteen books in a year. I wasn’t a person who read fourteen books in a year before this. I am now.
The coffee angle — because there always is one
There’s something that connects reading and coffee that goes beyond the pairing of the physical habit.
Both require a particular kind of attention. Both reward slowness in a culture that rewards speed. Both produce something that doesn’t arrive immediately — the flavour of a well-brewed cup develops as you drink it; the meaning of a good book develops as you read it and in the hours and days after you’ve put it down.
Both are, at their best, practices of presence. Ways of being in the moment you’re in rather than three moments ahead.
My morning now has a shape it didn’t have before: the grinder, the filter, the pour, the wait — and then the chair, the cup, and ten pages of wherever the book is taking me. Twenty-five minutes, most mornings. Thirty on the slow days. The best part of the day, almost without exception.
I don’t know exactly when it became the best part. It was gradual, the way all the important changes are. But I know that the cup and the pages are now inseparable, and that both of them are better for the company.
What I’d say to you
If you’ve been meaning to read more — and I think most people have been meaning to read more — I’d suggest not trying to read more. I’d suggest reading ten pages.
That’s it. Ten pages. With your morning coffee, so the habit borrows the certainty of something you already do. No goal beyond the page you’re on. No pressure beyond showing up for the ten pages the way you show up for the cup.
Do it for a month. Then tell me what’s changed.
What’s a habit that has quietly changed your life — the small, repeatable thing that turned out to be bigger than it looked? Tell me in the comments. And if you have a book recommendation, even better — I’m always looking for the next ten pages.
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