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 keeps finding 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, improving or professionally useful. 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 the book and get on with the rest of the day.
I started this a little over a year ago. I want to describe exactly what it did for me, because it did more than I expected, and not always in the ways I expected.
How it started, with a problem
The problem was this: I had stopped reading.
It didn’t happen dramatically or all at once. It happened the way most good habits die, gradually and without announcement. The books were still there, and the intention was always present. But over the past few years, my reading time had been taken over by other things: the phone, the scroll, and the endless supply of things that are easier than a page requiring sustained attention.
I’d pick up a book, read three pages, check something on my phone, lose the thread, and put the book down. I’d try again the next day with the same result. The books I meant to read sat on the shelf, making me feel slightly guilty every time I walked past them.
Then I read something, I can’t remember where, which is a little ironic, about the arithmetic of ten pages a day. Ten pages daily comes to about 3,650 pages a year. At an average of 250 pages a book, that’s roughly fourteen or fifteen books a year, read steadily, 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 had even got out of bed.
The problem was never time. It was the decision to spend that time on something that asked 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”. That sounds more ambitious but creates pressure that makes the habit fragile. Just ten. Exactly ten on the difficult days, and 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: the reading happens with the coffee. Not after the coffee, not before it, but with it. Both happen together every morning, until making the cup automatically brings on the urge to open the book.
That pairing is the mechanism. It’s why the habit held when other reading habits I’d tried before didn’t. The coffee was already non-negotiable, and attaching the reading to it borrowed that certainty.
What ten pages actually feels like
Some mornings, ten pages takes eleven minutes. The prose moves fast, the story is pulling me along, and I barely notice the pages turning.
Other mornings, ten pages takes twenty-five minutes. The book is making me think. It stops me at the end of a paragraph so I can sit with something, look out the window, and let an idea settle before I carry on. These are the best mornings, even when they’re the slowest.
Ten pages never feels like a chore. The limit is part of what protects the habit. Because I know it ends at ten pages, I never approach the book with the low-level dread of something open-ended. It’s contained and manageable, and that manageability keeps it 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 biggest effect of the habit: the quality of my thinking changed.
Not right away, and not dramatically. Over months, though, the way ideas arrived, how long they stayed, and how they connected to other ideas all shifted. The reading was putting images, arguments and ways of seeing into my head, and those quietly mixed 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 idea for how to organise a post. A short book about grief gave me a sentence I’ve gone back to many times when I’m trying to understand something 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 delivers information quickly and lets it go just as quickly. Reading at the pace of a page is slow enough for things to stick, and the ideas have time to find a place to live before the next one arrives.
What it did to this blog
I’ll be direct about this, because it’s 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, and the honesty was there, but the ideas were shallower. I was writing mostly from immediate experience and observation. That’s good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.
After a year of ten pages a day, the blog has more to say. The posts I’m proudest of, the one about Before the Coffee Gets Cold, the Mars post, and the letter to my twenty-year-old self, all carry something that came from a book. Not a quoted passage or a reference, but a way of thinking about something that I wouldn’t have had without the reading.
Reading makes writing better. I knew this before. I understand it now in a practical way, not just in theory.
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.
Right now I’m reading a novel I picked up on a stranger’s recommendation in a café. That’s the kind of discovery the habit makes more likely, because reading ten pages a day makes you someone who talks about books naturally, and people respond by telling you what they’re reading.
Before this one, I read a short book on the philosophy of time that I still think 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 afterwards.
Fourteen books in a year. I wasn’t someone who read fourteen books a year before this. I am now.
The coffee angle, because there always is one
Reading and coffee are connected in ways that go beyond the physical pairing.
Both need a particular kind of attention. Both reward slowness in a culture that rewards speed. Both give you something that doesn’t arrive all at once. The flavour of a well-brewed cup develops as you drink it, and the meaning of a good book develops as you read it and in the hours and days after you put it down.
At their best, both are practices of presence: ways of being in the moment you’re in, rather than three moments ahead.
My mornings now have a shape they 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 takes me. Twenty-five minutes on most mornings, thirty on the slow ones. It’s the best part of the day, almost without exception.
I can’t say exactly when it became the best part. It happened gradually, the way the important changes do. But the cup and the pages are now inseparable, and both are better for each other’s company.
What I’d say to you
If you’ve been meaning to read more, and I think most people have, I’d suggest not trying to read more. Read ten pages instead.
That’s all. 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, and 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.
Your turn
What small habit quietly changed your life? And what book should be my next ten pages?
recommendations very welcome
Tell me in the comments →
