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How do you divide up your reading time?

In our August “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I’m curious about how you divide your reading time among the following categories: readings directly related to your research; readings out of your philosophical curiosity but not related to your research; non-philosophical readings; and other types, if any. What percentages do you usually give to each?

I am a junior faculty member at a teaching oriented school. My research time is limited. When I have extra time, I always feel guilty if I do not read things related to my research. But I also have other interests, philosophical or not. So I am curious how you approach this.

Great question! I mostly read whatever interests me in my free time: historical biographies, popular science, etc. But what I’m interested in often relates in some way to my philosophical interests and research (or ends up doing so later on), so I don’t end up “feeling guilty” about it. I typically only read philosophy articles or books when I have an idea for a paper, a project already in progress, or when I just happen upon something that interests me. I’m not sure about percentages. I think it changes a lot.

What about readers? How do you divide up your reading time?

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6 responses to “How do you divide up your reading time?”

  1. Michel

    I mostly read for pleasure. I pretty much only read philosophy for particular projects, although occasionally I find something interesting during a lull in the projects, and I read it then. Occasionally work and pleasure intersect, and I’ll incorporate something into my pleasure reading list (for the last couple of years, I’ve been working on a book on a major extra-philosophical interest of mine, so there’s been a lot of overlap on that front).

    I don’t really have dedicated time for reading; I did until I had children, but now with two little ones, my dedicated time is for research in general. I devote that time to writing, mostly, and then reading for particular projects.

    One thing I do, however, is shift a tiny bit of the ‘to read’ pile into the courses I’m teaching.

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  2. Anonymous

    I abandoned reading non-philosophy for a long time during grad school, but I recently came back to it and I feel it makes my world richer in ways that actually also make me a better thinker. That said, I typically use the audiobook format for reading for pleasure, as it helps me create a mental divide between reading for work versus reading for pleasure. When it comes to reading philosophy, I prefer to do it NOT in the evenings as it can get my mind racing too much before bedtime.

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  3. Anonymous

    I am the same as the commenter above, and I like to put things into my courses that I want to read more deeply.

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  4. Corvus splendens

    No exact formula, but my “system” looks something like:

    (i) If something urgently needs reading for a writing project, then that can happen in “writing time” as long as I’ve hit my minimum time/word count for the day. Unless I literally can’t write what I need to until I’ve read it, that is.

    (ii) In “I don’t have anything specific to do, but I should be doing some philosophy” time, I pick something I’ve bookmarked on PhilPapers. Unless I’m really in need of a change, I prioritise stuff in my subfield, then in my broader AOS, then just cool stuff. If nothing appeals/is waiting, then I dip into the deeper backlog of monographs, theses, grey literature, weird preprints etc.

    (iii) I’m rarely the one building reading lists from the ground up, but if there’s material I need to read to teach it, or something from (i) or (ii) that will be useful, that gets folded into “teaching prep” time.

    (iv) I make a point to read (or, more often these days, listen) for pleasure before bed – mostly genre fiction – unless I’m extremely tired. Like other commenters I dropped out of reading much for pleasure in grad school, but I’ve found that it’s conducive to doing better elsewhere, as well as just being fun. Similarly, I try to read columns, newspaper articles, the more erudite blogs, etc. in “dead” time, in preference to podcasts/music/doomscrolling, but admit that doesn’t always happen.

    This tends to go slightly to pot when the teaching and admin pressure piles on, but what doesn’t. All (most?) reading is good reading, and some is (almost?) always better than none; nothing to feel guilty about!

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  5. Anonymous

    I don’t read philosophy just out of philosophical curisosity; I only read things that I think I will be able to use for research or teaching. However, my interests are very broad, so I still end up reading on a very wide range of topics. If I want to read more about a topic on which I have no specific plan to write a paper, I arrange to teach a seminar on it (after which I usually end up writing a paper anyway).

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  6. Anonymous

    I normally spend the first thirty minutes of my morning work time reading material that I find interesting or important but may or may not relate directly to my research. In my more dedicated “research time,” I might spend a lot of it reading or none of it, depending on where my work. So that could vary between 0-10 hours a week. Then for leisure reading, I just reading in the evening as I see fit; normally an hour or so.

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