Are you doing the "Get the book. Read the book. Do the exercises." method? If you are, what's your experience?

I have had some books stored up since forever, and graycat's post did motivate me to finally get around to reading them, but I find it hard to integrate into my daily routine. His 24h challenge killed my productivity for a day, and I can't really afford to get distracted by some tricky proof when I'm supposed to do something else.