Earlier this year I pondered why our kids don’t read and this morning I’m reading the CNN article with a study that found 1 in 4 people haven’t read a book in the last year. Not just the kids who aren’t reading, adults are guilty too. Could be a classic case of monkey see, monkey do.

With the new Stephen King / Richard Bachman hardcover book Blaze by my bed itching to be read, I’m looking in the mirror and trying to finger specifically what is to blame. My wife doesn’t have any trouble finding book reading time. We used to read together all the time but at some point over the last 10 years, my reading became dramatically more internet-related than book related. And when I’m not in front of the computer, I’m watching movies or playing games. Reading has become the odd man out.

The last books I remember reading cover to cover were Jose Canseco’s Juiced (2005) and Pete Rose’s My Prison Without Bars (2004). I didn’t read any book completely in 2006 and none have even been started thus far in 2007 with almost three quarters of the year gone. I started reading my first eBook Cell by Stephen King but only made it through the first 125 pages or so. Bad reader, me. I love reading too.

Where is your reading time going online?
I decided to break down the different communication areas online and rank the reading time spent on each. I’d be curious for those Hmm readers that read books how you are doing in these areas and how we compare. Let me know in the comments below.

1. email - daily, checked every five minutes. I’ve cut this back considerably from what it was five years ago but it’s still #1 for absorbing time every day. It’s not primarily reading the email, it’s responding to it. I tend to want to respond to emails as I read them instead of filing them to respond later.
2. RSS - daily, checked hourly. I spend at least an hour every day in my RSS reader. It allows me to skim through a lot of information and whittle down to reading specifically what interests me.
3. web non-news sites - daily, checked throughout the day. I visit lots of different websites, read through the content every day throughout the day, not only our own for work but lots of other websites. A lot of it is for research for future work, whether it be blog posts or products/services that might save time (isn’t that ironic) or money. Then there is the financial sites which I’ve started watching more closely since my wife and I started a friendly stock competiton (she’s kicking my ass in case you haven’t been following).
4. blogs - daily, checked throughout the day. Once I’ve identified through the RSS blog posts of interest, I visit blogs and will often read the posts there. Sometimes, I’ll stick around and read a few pages in the archives and if the blog search is good I might even peer deeper into the blog’s past, subscribe and/or leave a comment. I’m always on the lookout for a new read to subscribe to. This is one area where I could reduce time spent surfing blogs and make some time for reading books.
5. search engines - daily, 20-25 searches average daily. Google Trends reminds me that I spend a fair amount of time Googling every day. I’ve tried other search engines, but Google always draws me back (disclaimer: I own Google stock). I can’t see reducing my time spent in search engines, will have to take time away.
6. IRC / IM. I don’t spend much time doing any sort of chatting, so I lumped in with the IRC channel where I hang daily. Probably spend more time chatting in IRC on a daily basis than in all the other IM clients put together including the new wave chat places like MySpace, Twitter, Pownce, etc. Maybe I could curb some of my IRC time, but it’s not that significant.
7. Skype - daily / voice and chat. This is 95% essential communication for business primarily. No cuts can be made here. I’m not hanging around for many Skype random chats.
8. news sites - sporadically. Since I get my news via RSS I rarely visit news sites that aren’t already in my RSS reader directly. When I do hit news sites, I start at Google News and go from there.
9. messageboards/forums - infrequently. Messageboards used to be a regular haunt for me. For 6+ years I moderated and administrated a board, but this time is spent elsewhere. One of the few messageboards I visit with any regularity is the Stern Fan Network, a board for Howard Stern fans. I still don’t get that involved in there. There are other messageboards I visit here and there, but mostly this time has been allocated elsewhere. Nothing to cut here.

I’m leaving out some other things like groups, which might as well go with messageboards/forums. Newsgroups or mail lists would be categorized under email. It’s amazing sometimes when you look at the clock how much time went by. It’s lunch time here and I’m just kicking out my first blog post of the day.

I might have to start checking out the Getting Things Done (GTD) crowd to see if I can free up any more time for reading, or dare I say, just learn to unplug earlier in the day. I could also cut back on the movie watching. We watch 3-5 movies a week on average. That probably steals more time than any other leisure activity, including gaming. As for those reading wondering about TV? No time wasted there, our family has been without TV for 428 days and counting. Sports is my main regret there, especially with the Mariners in a pennant race and a new Seahawk season getting kicked off.

I’m spending too much time on the internet. Time to claim some back. What’s your story? How many books have you read so far in 2007? How many in 2006?

• Trading books you’ve read for books you want to read
• Buying that first eBook: Cell by Stephen King
• Use Book Suggester to find similar reads
• More digital reading and why is Sony Reader black and white only?
• Steve Lightfoot: “The truth about John Lennon’s murder”
• ‘Specially designed for comfortable reading’ er, not