Speed Reading Metronome

A metronome for speed reading that emits a discrete reminder to turn the page. A gentle nudge that progressively improves reading speed over time so that I/we can read all the books on my/our "to read" list at a steady pace.

Why?

As a person on a perpetual life learning & knowledge quest, I do a lot of reading every day. I read a minimum of 1 hour each morning. With this daily habit I have managed to read a couple of thousand books in the last 20 years.

I read an average of 1 book per week year round. This might sound like a little or a lot depending on your own reading practice and ambitions.

Sometimes I read several books a week (e.g: during the summer), but others I go down to 1 every 2 weeks when I'm particularly busy.

On Some days I read for 3 hours because I get immersed in the book, but I often find myself reading "slowly" ... For example I might read 20 pages per hour of a non-fiction book, i.e. 3 pages minutes per page (average). I know I can read much faster than this, because during University, I trained myself to speed-read in order to consume all the material necessary for the literature review in my masters thesis.

At the time I figured that the most effective way to get through the stack I had to read, was to learn how to speed-read. I spent a week learning to speed-read from scratch and then devoured tens of thousands of pages of books and journal articles in the subsequent weeks; it was a highly worthwhile effort!

Sadly, my reading speed has declined over the past few years, possibly due to chronic insomnia/tiredness, but for whatever reason, I find myself not getting through the books nearly as fast as I used to!

My hypothesis for this mini-project is that I can "nudge" myself to read faster, with a simple reading "metronome" to remind me to turn the page.

I might instantly get sick of the sound, but I want to experiment with it and see if I can make it work!

What?

A mini project to emit a "page turn" sound every minute (or set time interval)

Doesn't This Already Exist...?

As usual, when thinking about how to solve a problem, our first instinct is to search on Google¹ for the keywords we think are most likely to give us a result:
"reading metronome": https://www.google.com/search?q=reading+metronome

As you can see, we clicked and read every link to figure out if anyone else has already built this!

We also searched the iOS App Store and Google Play and didn't find anything matching "reading metronome".

Elm?

I could easily solve this in minutes using JavaScript (the language I've written most in the last 10 years) but in forcing myself to use Elm (_instead of reaching for my ["hammer"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument ..._), I develop the muscle memory in the skill I want to focus on.

Who?

This project is for me; I am the "target user". I'm "scratching my own itch". Ensuring the tightest possible feedback loop.

I'm writing publishing it as an example of why learning to code is a worthwhile personal investment. It means you can solve your own problems/challenges! The fact that you can get paid to write code which in turn enables you to do many other things with your life is a bonus, not the focus.

Pre-requisites?

The only pre-requisites for following this example are:

• [x] A Computer where you can install Elm
• [x] Basic Elm syntax knowledge e.g: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-elm (you don't need any "advanced" Elm/Programming knowledge, just syntax)
• [x] 30 minutes of time to read & and try the code.

How?