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The One Hundred Pages Strategy

On how to read one hundred pages every day.

While I would never suggest that reading one hundred pages a day is impossible for regular smartphone users, I do think that eliminating the temptation to waste time—a heading under which I would include responding instantaneously to a non-urgent email that could be answered in a few hours or even the next day—makes it far less difficult. Almost no one thinks twice about the purported wisdom of never leaving the house without a mobile phone—what if there were an emergency?—even though the actual odds of absolutely needing to make a call or send a text message during an unremarkable two-hour span on a Sunday afternoon are vanishingly small. (This is something I began doing as a teenager, when I found myself wondering how generations of editors had missed that in the Penguin Classics edition of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums the Gary Snyder stand-in called “Japhy Ryder” is referred to by his real first name on page 161.)

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