How to read more: ten habits that work

1. Set a goal in minutes, not books

A yearly book count is easy to set and hard to act on: on any given evening it tells you nothing. A daily goal in minutes tells you exactly what to do today. Start smaller than feels ambitious, ten minutes, and let it grow once it holds for a few weeks.

2. Give reading a fixed time and place

Habits stick to cues. Pick a moment that already happens every day, after dinner, on the train, in bed before the lights go out, and read then. A reminder or an alarm at that time does the remembering for you until the habit takes over.

3. Keep your phone out of reach

Most lost reading time goes to the phone, a few minutes at a time. Put it in another room, turn on Focus, or block the apps you scroll until you have read. Apple’s Screen Time can limit apps for free; dedicated apps can lock them until a goal is met. See how to read instead of scrolling.

4. Read what you actually enjoy

The fastest way to read more is to read books you want to get back to. Genre fiction, memoir, graphic novels and rereads all count. If a book is a chore, it will quietly end the habit.

5. Give yourself permission to quit a book

The librarian Nancy Pearl’s “rule of 50” is a good default: give a book fifty pages, and if it hasn’t caught you by then, move on. A book you dread is the most common reason people stop reading altogether.

6. Don’t let hard words stall you

Unknown words and dense passages are where readers lose the thread and reach for the phone, which is where the evening goes. Make looking something up cheap: a pencil mark to check later, or a voice assistant that answers without you leaving the page. See how to look up words while reading a paper book.

7. Keep a streak, but plan for missed days

A streak makes every day count, and that is its power and its danger: one missed day can make the whole thing feel lost. Decide in advance that a miss is fine and two in a row is not, or use a tracker that forgives a day now and then.

8. Keep the lines you love

Saving a sentence that struck you, and seeing it again later, is one of the quiet rewards that brings people back to a book. A notebook works; so does reading the line aloud to an app that keeps it. See how to save quotes from a paper book.

9. Always have the next book ready

The gap between books is where habits die. Keep the next one on the nightstand, or keep a short queue of what you’ll read next so finishing one book starts the next.

10. Count minutes, not pages

Pages vary wildly between books; minutes don’t. Tracking time read keeps a slow, dense book from feeling like failure, and shows you the habit itself, which is the thing worth protecting.

How much will I read?

Most adults read somewhere around 200 to 300 words a minute, and a typical paperback page holds about 300 words. That works out to roughly:

• 10 minutes a day: about a book a month, 10 to 12 a year.
• 20 minutes a day: a 300-page book every two to three weeks, around 20 a year.
• 30 minutes a day: around 30 books a year.

Apps that help

An app can carry the parts that are hard to do by willpower: the reminder, the streak, keeping the phone quiet, the lookup. Faria does all of these for paper books on iPhone, out loud, so your eyes stay on the page. For a fair look at the options, see apps that help you read more.