Reading Pace Comparison Calculator

This was prepared for Book Club Night. If you’re not ready for it, your book club night is going to stink. It will be you and a group of friends talking through one character’s trouble. Everyone else will have read the entire thing but you are only up to page forty. Panic sets in. What does that say about your reading speed? Or is it your time management?

Those are the problems that result from arithmetic, but most people don’t use data; they goes with their gut feeling. It’s not always as simple as pure speed. Someone who reads quickly may fail to hit their goal if they spends only 20-minutes per day with their nose in a book. On the other hand, someone who takes longer can spend an hour doing so, yet still get more pages done.

Why Use a Reading Speed Calculator

The context matters. It’s a lot easier to burn through a light thriller than it is to power through a dense academic text which changes things. Most of us think our reading rate will be consistent no matter what we pick up. But this isn’t necessarily true. After recording how long you like to sit down with a book (and its length), the calculator do the math for you. No more wondering if you’ll meet your deadline in time.

The input is important. One place to start is with words per minute. However, that number isn’t meaningful unless you know what kind of book you’re reading and roughly how many word are on each page of your specific edition. Some books has plenty of white space; others contain very few words per page. For example, if you plug into the calculator a “standard” number of words-per-page based off a page full of white space, it’ll guess too high how much you can get done. You think, “I’m going to read thirty pages today,” but then text’s font makes it stretch across more pages, leaving you with only twenty actual pages to read. This matters. The tool prompts you for this information to avoid making that sort of calculation.

Reading speed is also influenced by focus. For long periods, people don’t tend to read with maximum efficiency. You’ll stop to re-read a confusing paragraph or look up a name. To reflect these slow-downs, the calculator has a focus percentage. This means that if you set this to one hundred percent, you’re assuming that there are no distractions and you retain everything perfectly (an unrealistic assumption). Bring this down to ninety percent and you’re being realistic and leaving some wiggle-room for times where prose gets hard or you get distracted from thought.

Life happens, and it’s important to have buffers around deadlines. Sometimes you’re going to take a day off, sometimes you’ll be too tired to finish reading after work. When this happens, enter those missed days into your planner. This will adjust the daily pace of your other active days. It prevents a relaxed schedule from turning into an impossible Friday night marathon just because you took Tuesday off.

Various types of books require different amounts of caution, as seen in the reference table; novels has less buffer space than textbooks. Why? A novel doesn’t slow you down nearly as much then taking notes in a textbook does. Readers aren’t competing. They’re not even really being compared; this is all about managing expectations. When there’s going to be a read-along, understanding each other’s places allows you to establish reasonable check-ins that will keep things fair. You’ll see who can trot along at their own pace without feeling guilty and who has to bust out a sprint to reach the finish line. With the numbers in hand, you can see how much time separates the finish lines, depending on how often they meet up and where they are now.

There’s no shame in lagging behind, frame it as a logistical problem, not something you did wrong. Running the numbers before opening the cover is one way to think of pace-reading as project management. Your “project” is finishing a book, and your “resources” are the amount of time available. By planning it out, you eliminate that uncertainty. Instead of wondering whether or not you’ll finish on time, you know exactly how many pages you’re reading every night. This replaces the stress of uncertainty with clarity. You have a defined goal for what you need to accomplish every day. And that’s where pace-reading gets its power.