How to Read More Books When Your Days Are Already Full

Most people who want to read more assume the problem is time. Usually it is something smaller: no fixed place in the day for reading, and a habit of finishing books they stopped enjoying fifty pages in. If you want to know how to read more books, start there. Give reading a slot, not a hope, and give yourself permission to quit.

Speed reading, challenges and yearly targets can help at the margins. The two changes above do most of the work, and they cost nothing.

Time is the usual excuse, and for a lot of people it is a real one. If your evenings have already been swallowed by work, the work life balance examples we collected are a better starting point than any reading plan. And if the next book is a decision you keep putting off, the rule from rapid decision making applies: it is easy to reverse, so pick one today.

Reading Loses Because It Has No Slot

Almost everything else in a working day has a time. Meetings, meals, the school run, the gym. Reading gets whatever is left over, which is usually the last fifteen minutes before sleep, when you are too tired to follow a paragraph.

The fix is to give it a fixed, small slot attached to something you already do. Twenty minutes with the first coffee. The commute. The first part of lunch. The time is less important than the fact that it happens every day at the same point, so that it stops being a decision.

This is the same logic as any habit that lasts. You are not relying on motivation, you are relying on a trigger. When the trigger arrives, the book comes out.

The Maths of Twenty Minutes

A large review of reading research by Marc Brysbaert, How many words do we read per minute?, put the average adult silent reading speed for non-fiction at about 238 words a minute.

Take that figure and a modest habit of twenty minutes a day. That is roughly 4,760 words a day. A book of 70,000 words, a common length for non-fiction, takes around fifteen days. Over a year, that is more than twenty books, from a daily slot shorter than most lunch breaks.

The numbers are approximate. You will read some books faster and some slower. The point holds: small, daily reading beats occasional long sessions by a wide margin, because it actually happens.

Quit Books Faster

The biggest hidden brake on reading is a book you are not enjoying and will not abandon. It sits on the nightstand for weeks. You do not want to read it, so you read nothing.

Give every book a trial. Fifty pages, or the first two chapters. If it has not earned your attention by then, stop, and start the next one. You are not reviewing it. You are choosing how to spend a scarce hour.

This feels wasteful at first. It is the opposite. Every book you drop early buys time for one you will finish and remember. Readers who get through a lot of books are rarely faster than you. They are simply quicker to move on.

Choosing what to start matters too. When a decision about the next book stalls, treat it the way our piece on how financial advisors make money treats a product choice: know what you want from it before you commit. A book you picked for a reason is easier to keep reading than one picked because it was on a list.

How to Read More Books Without Giving Up Anything Else

The practical changes are small and they stack.

Always have the next book ready. The gap between finishing one and choosing another can last a month. Keep a short list and buy or borrow the next one before you finish the current one.

Carry reading everywhere. A phone app or a small e-reader turns waiting rooms, queues and delays into reading time. Five minutes here and there adds up to a chapter by the end of the day.

Try audio for the hours your hands are busy: walking, driving, cooking. It counts. For many people it doubles their reading without taking any time from anything else.

Read more than one book at a time, of different kinds. Something demanding for the morning, something lighter for the evening. When your energy does not suit one, it suits the other.

Replace one screen habit, not all of them. Pick the one that least deserves your time, the late evening scroll for most people, and put the book there instead. Twenty minutes moved is twenty minutes gained.

Fiction Counts

Many people who want to read more quietly restrict themselves to books that feel useful: business, psychology, history with a lesson attached. Then they wonder why reading feels like homework.

Fiction belongs in the rotation. It is often the book you actually want to pick up at the end of a long day, and that is exactly why it keeps the habit alive. A novel read with pleasure does more for your reading life than a management book you drag yourself through.

It is also less of a detour than it looks. Good novels are long studies of how people decide, persuade, fail and recover. If you manage people, that is not wasted time.

Make It Visible and Social

Habits stick better when other people notice them. A short list of what you have read this year, kept in a notebook or on your phone, turns a vague intention into a record you want to keep adding to.

Talking about books helps too. Recommend one to a colleague, trade books with a friend, or join a small group that meets every month or two. A date on the calendar with people expecting you to have read something is a very effective deadline.

For anyone asking how to read more books with children at home, the simplest version is to read where they can see you. It sets the example and it gives you twenty honest minutes in the same room.

Remember More of What You Read

Reading more is only useful if some of it stays. A few minutes of notes when you finish a chapter makes a large difference. Write down the one idea you want to keep, in your own words, and one place you could use it.

The method in our guide on how to take notes effectively works just as well for books as for meetings: short, reworded, and reviewed. A single page per book, reread a month later, is enough to keep most of what mattered.

If you read to make better decisions, it also helps to choose deliberately. Our list of the best books on decision making is a good place to start.

What Reading Gives Back

People who run businesses often treat reading as a luxury to earn after the work is done. That gets the order wrong. A good book is one of the cheapest ways to borrow someone else’s decade of experience, and a quiet daily slot for it is one of the few habits that improves both the work and the evenings.

Tonight, pick the slot. Tomorrow, twenty minutes. Quit anything that has not earned its place by page fifty. That is how to read more books without finding a single extra hour.