Calculate How Many Books You Can Read If You Leave Social Media
The new calculator from Omni Calculator shows how many books you could read in a year if you checked them instead of checking social media. Indicate how often you check social media (or time-wasting sites that you are willing to give up) and how much time you spend on them each time you visit. Omni Calculator will turn this into book counting based on typical page count and reading speed.
You can play around with all of these variables for a personalized assessment, and you can check your reading speed on the Reading Length website.
This is a fairly fair comparison – in most cases, when you could read Facebook for a few minutes, you could also read an e-book. I am not saying that you should never use social media as it is a legal way to keep in touch with friends. But if you feel like you are spending too much time on social media, this calculator will show you how much deeper you could read.
(Although the Omni Calculator also tells you how much jogging or watching TV you can do in that time, these are nonsense comparisons. We’re talking about spending a few minutes on your phone in line or on the toilet. This is true for comparing one phone to an action another phone.)
I openly lied to this site and pretended to only check social media every 2 hours, for 5 minutes at a time. I even said that I read great books. And the Omni Calculator still told me that if I opened my Kindle instead of Twitter or Instagram, I could read 32 more damn books in a year. It would be crazy not to replace some of your time on social media with reading books.
You can use certain strategies to switch: on your phone, put the e-book app on the home screen and hide the social media apps in a folder, or delete them entirely. Allow yourself to only log into Twitter and Facebook through your mobile browser. Keep your free Project Gutenberg book open in the tab where you usually leave your news feed. Email yourself articles to read. Use the Freedom app to block sites and apps that waste time at specific times of the day. (You can leave social media on in the morning, but instead force yourself to read books during the day.)