My System to Keep a Reading Habit

Curating daily content and building a sustainable reading habit to stay informed and engaged

• 7 min read

Tags: productivity leadership technology career

Generated by Gemini 3 Pro (Nano Banana)

I get asked how I stay informed as a technology professional when the industry seems to be moving faster than it ever has and the demands of staying informed to keep up have never been higher. In this post, I'll summarize what works for me so that it might inform you if you're curious and supplement your practice if you're looking to get better at it.

Reading is how I like to stay informed about the world as well as a hobby that gives me an opportunity to intermittently distance myself from my mostly digitally-driven life. At the time of writing, I'm one day away from a 365-day streak of reading at least one page of some kind of content every single day and I've read 40 books this year so far.

Reading for Information and Education

Here's the system I use to stay informed for targeted professional purposes. This section could also be considered the more "official" or "formal" side of my reading habit. I consider reading about topics related to my job and current world events to be enjoyable, however they're not a fully recreational set of activities or topics and lean practically towards my overall growth and development as a professional.

Below is the bookmarks folder I simply label as "Daily Reads". I (try to) go through these links daily or weekly depending on the publishing schedule.

Reading List Bookmarks

  • Hacker News (daily) - HN is well known in the tech community as a sort of "front page" for the industry. It has a frontpage algorithm driven by reader engagement on posted links where the active userbase is strongly populated with the who's who of the tech and startup communities. This one has been at the top of my list for years and has consistently delivered a surprisingly diverse set of content not just focused on technology startups. The dialogue in the comments can skew a bit on the "snobby" side, I'll say—however the equally high intellectual and contextual rigor given to the conversation is pretty unique for internet forums at large. I've consistently seen popular links posted here on a particular day being ported to other publications a day or two later.

  • TLDR Newsletter (weekdays) - This one was pushed to me via targeted advertising on social media. I think of it as my "Hacker News supplement". The content is primarily tech focused and I can usually find at least one link that I already saw the previous day on Hacker News. But all in all, there have been at least one or two unique finds worth reading each day here to keep it on my daily reading rotation.

  • Kagi News (daily) - This is my break out of just reading about technology every day. There's a lot going on in the world each day and if I'd like to consider myself informed in a balanced way, I reached for a more comprehensive news source. I landed on Kagi News (then named Kite News) after rotating through the more "traditional" news publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other rising internet news publications including Ground News. The fact is, I am still experimenting here. I'm still trying to settle on a news source that I personally feel finds a healthy balance between reporting on the sensational mainstream, USA-centric news while including the underrepresented but equally important global news.

  • Software Lead Weekly (weekly on Fridays) - Rounding out the bunch is the focused curation into content centered around leadership and, more specifically, leadership in software and technology. Oren has built what I think is a valuable resource for technology leaders and consistently curates quality reading content from which I always glean something that helps me in my job and even my life (The progressive webapp version of the website is also really well done).

The list is driven by a few core objectives/strategies that inform what I'm trying to get out of the content:

  1. The amount of total daily content should be easily read through, at least at a top level, in around 30 minutes. That would include deep reads of one to two links per source. The list could change and grow but generally if I'm having to read through more than five sources, my habit is probably going to fall off.
  2. The content should inform me about my top 3 interests: current events, technology, and leadership. I'd like to receive these topics in a balanced way such that I'm not tunnel-visioned into just the topics that interest me but rather all those that give me the best, most informative perspective.
  3. The content should be accessible in a deliberate way and not just pushed to me via an algorithm that prioritizes engagement over everything. If I'm not making some deliberate decision on what content I'm consuming, when, and how, it means that I'm delegating my outcome of being informed to something whose objectives are not aligned to my own.

Reading for Fun

This part of my reading habit has no objective to be directly practical or beneficial towards my growth as a professional. I reserve my reading list of novels, short stories, and other literature purely for things I want to read or that I find interesting or fun. Generally, I'll end up finding some learning or indirect benefit from these activities, but my going-in stance is pure indulgence and recreation.

My consistent reading habit and respectable number of completed novels this year has been enabled by a few strategies I've developed over just this year:

  1. Always give myself multiple choices of what book I could be reading at any given time
  2. Take advantage of all formats of books available to me (physical, e-book, audiobook)
  3. Have easily accessible options on my phone as an alternative activity to scrolling a dopamine drip algorithmic feed
  4. Give myself permission to ditch and not finish books that I didn't find interesting or engaging
    To put these strategies into practice, at all times I'm in-progress on:
  • An Audiobook on Audible - A Pro Tip on this one: I use a "hidden" subscription option under the Premium Plus offering that gives one audiobook credit every other month since I found that one every month was too much and a waste of money for me
  • An Audiobook on Spotify - Premium Duo plan provides 15 hours of audiobook listening
  • An e-book on Kindle (Paperwhite and mobile app) - usually borrowed from my local library via Libby
  • A physical book

Having multiple books and formats to reach for makes it so it's incredibly easy to always get some reading done each day. Removing this mental friction and giving myself options to switch between different books has been key for me to building a consistent reading habit. If I happen to be around my physical book, I try to pick it up with the target of reading a page and generally end up reading more than that. If I'm driving, I pop an audiobook on. Even ten minutes a day stacks up to a lot of progress over a month. In pretty much any other scenario, I have my phone and an e-book is a couple of taps away just like any other app I'd otherwise fill my idle time and attention with.

To wrap up my thoughts: I came to this current reading system and gleaned its results through deliberate and consistent experimentation over most of this year. While scrolling algorithmic, curated feeds optimized to catch and hold my attention might have made me feel like I was reading more - it did not fulfill my desire to be more informed and mentally engaged with new information at a pace that my mind could meaningfully digest. That, balanced with the activity of reading for no other purpose than fun completes the objective of my overall system.

I hope this was insightful and informative for you, reader!

The post was authored with editorial (Claude Opus 4.5) and visual (Gemini 3 Pro) support from Generative AI. All words are my own.