Work Out How Many Pages A Day Your Reading List Really Needs
Nobody falls behind a reading list by accident; they fall behind because the arithmetic was never done in week one. This totals the pages, subtracts the weeks you will lose to essays and exams, and divides what's left into a daily rate — then shows which individual texts cannot be read cover to cover at that rate. Local only; nothing leaves the tab.
- Ledger
- Total pages divided by the weeks you actually have
- local
- What it replaces
- Optimism in week one and panic in week eight
- $0.00
- Input
- Texts with page counts, weeks, and lost weeks
- no card
- Output
- A daily rate and a per-text breakdown
- recomputed
What you pay otherwise
| Route | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Summaries instead of the text | Someone else's reading, in an emergency | $10+/text |
| Reading none of it | Discovering the gap the night before the seminar | the mark |
| Attempting all of it | Skimming everything and retaining nothing | the point |
| This page | The real daily rate, in week one | $0 |
The workflow
Count the pages you'll actually be asked about
A 600-page monograph where two chapters are set reading is a 90-page text for planning purposes. Enter what's assigned, not the spine width — the ledger is only as honest as this number.
Subtract the weeks you know you'll lose
Essay deadlines, lab reports, and revision weeks are not reading weeks. Most students lose three or four weeks of a twelve-week term. Leaving them in produces a daily rate that looks achievable and isn't.
Use your real reading speed, not your fastest
Dense academic prose runs far slower than a novel — often 10 to 15 pages an hour rather than 40. Enter the rate you actually sustain on this kind of material, because everything downstream depends on it.
Triage the unreachable texts deliberately
When the ledger flags a text as exceeding your daily rate, that's a decision point, not a failure. Choose which chapters to read properly and which to skim, in week one, rather than defaulting to skipping whichever you reach last.
Worked example
Sample: 5 texts, 1,420 pages, 12 weeks less 3 lost Effective weeks 9 (63 days at 7 days/week) Pages per day 22.5 Hours per day 1.88 at 12 pages/hour Heaviest text Foucault, 480 pp = 33.8% of the load Uploaded nothing — computed in the tab
Numbers above are sample data produced by the tool's own pre-loaded example, run in the browser — not averages or measured benchmarks.
What breaks this
Entering the full page count of a monograph when only two chapters are set inflates the daily rate and makes the plan look impossible. Not subtracting lost weeks produces a rate you cannot hold. Using your novel-reading speed for dense academic prose understates the time by a factor of three.
Try it now
Five texts totalling 1,420 pages over twelve weeks are loaded at 22.5 pages a day. Set lost weeks to 6 and watch the daily rate pass 30.
Open the planner →Go deeper: the printable ledger
The plan is free forever. The $4 one-time tier adds:
- Printable ledger — the reading plan on one sheet — estimate: ~8 min saved rebuilding it when the list changes.
- Saved reading shelf — keep up to 10 courses in this browser — estimate: ~12 min saved across a term.
- Week-by-week schedule — the pages allocated to each week — estimate: ~15 min saved laying it out by hand.