how to find time to read

Where I Actually Find Time to Read (Nothing Fancy)

Americans watch TV for 2 hours 36 minutes per day on average (BLS, 2024) and look at phones for 5h 16m (Harmony Healthcare IT, 2024). The reading time isn't missing — it's been reallocated. Here's how I got some of it back.

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Oliver Grant

verifiedLast updated & fact-checked: May 31, 2026 · 22 min read

There is a particular kind of reading-advice article — you have seen it, you have nodded at it, you have not done what it told you to do — that opens with the writer recommending you build a reading sanctuary. You will need, the article explains, a designated chair, a small side table, soft warm lighting, a candle if you are that kind of person, a beverage, a blanket, and a thirty-minute uninterrupted block on the calendar, preferably the same time every day, ideally first thing in the morning before anyone else in the house wakes up. The article is being written, sincerely, by someone who has these things. The article is being read, also sincerely, by someone who does not. The advice is good if you live in the writer's house. It is approximately useless if you live in your own.

I spent most of the years between twenty-eight and thirty-four trying, in spasms, to be the kind of person the sanctuary article was written for. The candle and the chair and the thirty-minute morning block all turned out to be the kind of structures that produce, in real life, two weeks of compliance and then a five-month relapse. By the time I was thirty-five, I had read fewer books than the previous year for the third year in a row, and I had also, separately, spent enough on small designated reading furniture to have funded a respectable book habit. The math was bad. The setup was worse.

What changed was not a new routine. It was a single quiet observation that I had not, in fact, lost the time. I had reallocated it. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2024 American Time Use Survey, the average American adult spent 2 hours and 36 minutes per day watching television — the most common single activity in the country, ahead of every form of work, every form of socialising, every form of childcare (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey — 2024 Results). A December 2024 Harmony Healthcare IT survey found Americans average 5 hours and 16 minutes per day on their smartphones, up roughly 14% from the previous year (Harmony Healthcare IT, American Phone Usage & Screen Time Statistics, 2024). The reading time has not gone missing. It has gone to a small flat rectangle that is, in most cases, also where the reading would have happened, if reading had been on the rectangle in the first place. The question is not how do I find an hour for reading. The question is much smaller: which of the small ten-minute slots in the day am I willing to give back to a book?

What follows is what I actually do — none of it heroic, none of it requiring a sanctuary, all of it tested on a normal life that includes work, dishes, dependents, and a Sunday-night dread about the week ahead. The short version is that reading time is not a thing you create. It is a thing you notice. The noticing is the entire skill.

The Short Version

  • Americans watch TV for 2 hours 36 minutes per day on average (BLS ATUS, 2024) and spend roughly 5 hours 16 minutes on phones (Harmony Healthcare IT, 2024). The reading time isn't missing — it's been reallocated.
  • The morning-routine sanctuary advice works for the small self-selecting population who already have empty mornings; for everyone else it is a structural mismatch
  • Most of my reading happens in stolen ten-minute slots — the kettle is on, the meeting is starting late, the kid is in the bath, the bus is moving, the laundry is in cycle three of seven. None of those slots will find themselves; you have to notice them and have a book within reach.
  • The single most useful intervention I made was getting the book within reach of the slot — kitchen, bag, jacket pocket, bedside, car. The reach distance, in my experience, predicts the reading rate more than the time block does.
  • Switching format is the second most useful intervention — the audiobook on the walk, the Kindle in the dentist's waiting room, the paperback in the bag. The form factor that matches the slot is the form factor that gets read.

Why the “wake up at 5 AM” advice does not, in fact, work

The deep error in most reading-advice articles is the assumption that time is the binding constraint on adult reading. It is not. The binding constraint is attention in available windows, and the available windows in most adult lives are not thirty minutes long. They are seven minutes long, eleven minutes long, the four minutes between when the toast goes in and when it comes out. The advice to carve out thirty uninterrupted minutes is, structurally, asking you to merge five seven-minute slots into one thirty-minute slot, which requires you to also evict the five things that were filling the original slots. For most adults, the five things are not negotiable. The thirty-minute block does not get carved out. The reading does not happen. The Goodreads challenge bar stays at three books a year. The sanctuary chair grows a thin layer of dust.

The other, related error is the assumption that first thing in the morning is the high-quality window for reading. For some people it is. For most people it is the window in which they are still half-asleep, the household is at its loudest, the day's first decisions need to be made, and the body is dealing with the question of whether to be a person yet. Reading in this window is plausible if you are single, child-free, and have an empty calendar before 9 AM. It is implausible if you are not. The morning-routine literature is, I suspect, the textual residue of a small population of people who do have empty mornings, writing about their habits as though the rest of us had simply failed to prioritise. We have not failed to prioritise. We have a different calendar.

The cognitive-psychology evidence on chunked reading is more encouraging than the sanctuary advice suggests. Reading benefits from continuity within a single session, yes, but the gains from a thirty-minute session over three ten-minute sessions are not nearly as large as the productivity literature assumes. Short, frequent sessions on the same book sustain narrative comprehension perfectly well — provided the reader is genuinely absorbed during the short sessions. The relevant variable is quality of attention, not duration of block. A reader who is genuinely in a book for nine minutes is making more headway than a reader who is in a thirty-minute block but checking their phone every two minutes. The phone is not a small additional cost. The phone is most of the cost.

Personal experience: I tracked my own reading, informally, for about six months in 2023 to figure out where it was actually happening. The results were unflattering to my self-image. Roughly 5% of my reading happened in a designated chair with a beverage. About 30% happened on transit. About 20% happened in the bath. About 15% happened in the eleven-minute window between getting into bed and falling asleep. The rest happened in small ten-and-under-minute slots while waiting for something — a coffee, a meeting, a child, a partner, a kettle, a doctor. The chair-and-beverage reading was, statistically, the least of it. I had been treating the exception as the category. Once I stopped, the year got noticeably better.

Where the time actually comes from

Here is what I actually do, with the caveat that none of these are recommendations. They are simply the small slots in my actual life that I have learned to fill with a book instead of with the alternative.

Transit. Any sustained transit time longer than seven minutes. The bus, the train, the back of a car, occasionally the front of one if someone else is driving and I am not navigating. The audiobook is the form factor for this; the paperback works if the transit is rail-shaped. The pattern is that the alternative — scrolling — is the default, and the active intervention is choosing the book instead. I do not always choose the book. I do choose it more often than I did when I was treating transit as too short to count.

Waiting rooms and queues. The dentist, the GP, the pharmacy, the school pickup line, the line at the post office, the eleven-minute wait after the lab took the blood and before they would let me leave. These slots are the canonical small, unprotected window the productivity literature does not acknowledge. They are also some of the easiest reading slots in adult life because the alternative — staring at the wall or refreshing the same three apps — is genuinely worse than the book. The Kindle app on a phone is the form factor here; a slim paperback in a bag works too. The fancy advice about carving out time misses that this time has already been carved out for you, by the dentist, by the queue, by the school. You only have to fill it.

The kettle. This is its own slot. The kettle takes between three and five minutes depending on volume. In those minutes I used to check Twitter and now read about a page and a half of whatever paperback is on the kitchen counter. The counter is the entire point. The book has to be on the counter; if it is in another room, the slot collapses and I check Twitter. I have, for this reason, two paperbacks living permanently in the kitchen at any given time. They get rotated when they are finished. This is the most embarrassing piece of practical reading advice I will ever give. It also produces, by my count, about four books a year.

The bath. The bath is a forty-minute window in which a person is alone, warm, generally not being asked to do anything, and unable to use most of their devices without a low-grade fear of dropping them. It is, structurally, the best reading slot in a domestic adult life. The trick is the format — a paperback that you do not mind getting slightly steamy is the right object; the Kindle Paperwhite is also defensible and is more water-resistant than the marketing suggests. I have read, on honest count, considerably more books in baths than in chairs.

The last eleven minutes before sleep. Not the thirty minutes of mindful pre-bed reading the literature recommends. The actual eleven minutes between when the lamp goes on and when I cannot keep my eyes open. The book has to be on the bedside table, and the book has to be the right kind of book for tired reading — something I am genuinely curious about, not something I am supposed to be reading. The novel works. The dense non-fiction usually does not. I get through, on average, about two pages a night, sometimes more, and I have finished a non-trivial fraction of every book I have ever read in this slot.

Meeting overruns. When a meeting starts late or runs long, there is a small window of three to seven minutes that the productivity literature treats as recovery time and that I have, over the last year, started treating as a small reading slot. The Kindle app on a phone is good for this; the paperback under the desk is even better if you have a desk-job set up that allows it. The key practical move is the same as the kettle: the book has to be in the slot already, before the slot opens. Reading does not happen in time you have to fetch.

The eight-minute coffee wait. Self-explanatory.

The cycle three of seven minutes of laundry. Self-explanatory.

The wait for the partner / kid / housemate to be ready to go. Self-explanatory.

The fifteen minutes after you said you were going to sleep but you can't quite yet. Self-explanatory.

The honest pattern across all of these is that reading time, in adult life, is rarely time you give yourself. It is time that has already been given to you by the structure of the day — small, unprotected, irregularly shaped windows during which you are waiting for something else to start, finish, or arrive. The productivity literature treats these windows as residue. They are not residue. They are most of the time you have. The reader who has learned to recognise them and have a book within reach during them is, in my honest experience, the same reader who finishes thirty or forty books in a year while otherwise living a normal life. The sanctuary reader is finishing four.

The phone is most of the cost (and most of the available time)

There is a piece of arithmetic worth sitting with for a moment. The average American adult's daily smartphone use is about 5 hours and 16 minutes, per the Harmony Healthcare IT 2024 survey. If you read at an average adult reading pace of roughly 250 words per minute, and a typical trade paperback runs about 80,000 words, the math says you could finish one full book every two to three days at average phone-use volume. You could finish, conservatively, 150 books a year at average national phone-use volume. The reason most of us are finishing four to twelve books a year, by Pew's 2025 numbers, is not that the time is not there. The time is overwhelmingly there. It is being spent on a different thing.

This is not a moralising point. There are perfectly good reasons phone use has displaced reading. The phone is designed to feel rewarding within seconds, the book is not. The phone is engineered to make the next interaction frictionless, the book has a 300-page commitment baked in. The phone is in your pocket; the book is on the shelf in another room. The comparison is not fair. The cards are stacked.

But the cards being stacked does not change the underlying time math. The 5 hours and 16 minutes are still there. The question is what proportion of that time you are willing — not by morally heroic effort but by small structural adjustment — to give back to a book. In my honest experience the proportion I have managed is small. About 30 minutes a day, against the 5+ hour national baseline. That 30 minutes, however, produces between 25 and 40 books a year, which is several multiples of the national average. The intervention is not large. The intervention is mostly having the book within reach of the slot that would otherwise have been the phone.

The single move that helped me most was deleting the Twitter app off my phone — keeping the website, just not the app — and replacing it on the home screen with the Kindle app. The slot in which I would previously have opened Twitter for three minutes now contains, with about 60% probability, three minutes of whatever Kindle book I am in the middle of. The other 40% of the time it still contains Twitter, via the browser. That is fine. The win is not eliminating the phone. The win is a small structural friction that nudges the default in the direction of the book.

What I actually keep within reach (this is the whole article, really)

The single most useful piece of practical reading advice I have ever read or given is the book has to be within reach of the slot. Reading does not happen in time you have to go and fetch the book to use. Reading happens in time you already have the book in. The implication is that the placement of books matters more than the scheduling of reading time, which is the opposite of what most reading advice tells you.

What this means in my actual house: there are roughly six books out at any given time, in specific locations. One on the kitchen counter (kettle slot). One on the bedside table (last-eleven-minutes slot). One in the work bag (transit + waiting-room slot). One on the bath shelf (bath slot, format-appropriate). One on the Kindle app on my phone (every other slot). And one in the car door pocket (rare-but-it-happens parked-waiting-for-someone slot). They are sometimes the same book, syncing across formats on Kindle. They are usually different books, depending on which slot rewards what kind of reading. The car book is usually a memoir or essays — anything I can be in for three minutes without losing the thread. The bath book is the long novel. The bedside book is whatever is genuinely calling me, the kind of book where I want to read the next page before I sleep.

The system, if you can call it a system, took me about a month to figure out and has, since then, doubled the books I finish in a year. None of it required carving out time. None of it required a candle. All of it required noticing that the slots were already there.

For the related territory of why you forget what you read in these chunked sessions and what to do about it, our why you forget everything you read covers the memory side. For the question of which books to keep within reach in the first place, our self-help books that were actually kind of fun to read covers a small fraction of the answer in the lighter register.

If a book is too much, listen to one

A specific practical note: the slots that the morning-routine literature treats as non-reading time — the commute, the school run, the dishes, the dog walk, the laundry-folding hour — are often perfect audio slots. Switching the format of a book from paper to audio frequently doubles the daily reading total without requiring any additional time. The book you have been carrying around in the bag for six weeks may finish itself in eight days as an audiobook on the dog walks. The form factor that matches the slot is the form factor that gets read.

If you do not already have an audiobook subscription, a free Audible trial is the most direct route to testing this — our honest Audible review for 2026 covers the worth-it-or-not maths before you commit, and our Audible vs Kindle Unlimited comparison walks through which subscription fits how you actually read. If you would rather read in text on a Kindle — and the Kindle app on a phone, for free, is genuinely most of the value — the same book can usually be moved across all three formats at this point, with progress syncing between them. Your library's free Libby app will also stock most of what you want, often in both text and audio. The right format for a slot is the format that gets the book finished. None of them is morally superior.

Disclosure: BetterLifeReads is an Amazon Associate. If you sign up through links in this article, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. This does not change the editorial assessment above — the books were chosen first, and the affiliate links added after. See our full affiliate disclosure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I actually need to read for thirty minutes at a time to get anywhere?

No. The cognitive-psychology evidence on chunked reading is reasonably clear that short, frequent sessions on the same book sustain narrative comprehension and memory well, provided the quality of attention during the short sessions is good. The thirty-minute block is a preference, not a requirement. A reader doing three ten-minute sessions on the same book, with genuine attention during each, makes meaningful headway. A reader doing a thirty-minute block with the phone face-up on the table is making less than they think.

Where do you find time to read when you work full-time and have kids?

Most of the slots in this article — kettle, bath, waiting room, transit, last eleven minutes, meeting overrun, queue, laundry cycle, partner-getting-ready, kid-in-the-bath — exist especially in a working life with dependents. They are some of the most reliable reading windows in the schedule, precisely because they are forced on you by the structure of the day. The reader without dependents has a different pattern of slots; the reader with them has more slots, not fewer. The slots are simply shorter and more irregular. The reach-distance heuristic — book within reach of the slot — matters more, not less, when the slots are short.

Is there research on this stuff or are you just making it up?

The headline numbers are real. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2024 American Time Use Survey reports the average American adult watches 2 hours 36 minutes of TV per day (BLS ATUS, 2024). Harmony Healthcare IT's 2024 survey, summarised by their published report, found average smartphone use at 5 hours 16 minutes per day (Harmony Healthcare IT, 2024). The specific practical claims about where I read and how the slot system works are my own observed experience over several years of changing my reading patterns; they are not peer-reviewed. The underlying principle that short, frequent reading sessions can sustain comprehension is well-supported in the reading-research literature, including in Daniel Willingham's widely-read summaries of the cognitive-psychology evidence on reading.

What about reading in bed before sleep? Doesn't that mess with sleep?

The published sleep-medicine literature is more relaxed about pre-sleep paper reading than the popular sleep-hygiene advice suggests. The concern about screens before bed is largely about blue-light exposure and engagement-induced arousal (i.e., the alerting content of what is on the screen). A paper book in dim warm light, on a topic that is not anxiety-producing, generally does not interfere with sleep onset and may help wind a reader down. A phone or tablet held inches from your face does interfere. The form factor matters, and the content matters; the reading itself, in print, is mostly fine. The eleven minutes between lamp-on and eyes-closing are an entirely legitimate reading slot.

Should I quit social media to read more?

You probably do not need to. The intervention that worked for me was much smaller: deleting one app off my phone's home screen and putting the Kindle app in its place, keeping the social-media site accessible via the browser. The small added friction is enough to shift the default in the direction of the book about 60% of the time. The remaining 40% of the time I still scroll. That is fine. The win is the small structural nudge, not the moral renunciation.

What is the single most useful change to make first?

Move the book within reach of the slot. Pick the slot in your day that is most consistently the same shape — the kettle, the bus, the last eleven minutes before sleep — and put one book in arm's length of that slot, permanently. Do not move the book. Do not let the book wander. Replace it only when it is finished. The slot will, within about a week, become a reading slot without any conscious effort on your part. That is the entire system. Most of the rest of this article is just variations on it.

About this article

Written by Oliver Grant, an independent writer covering evidence-based self-help and reading-platform publishing for BetterLifeReads. This article draws on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2024 American Time Use Survey, the Harmony Healthcare IT 2024 survey on American phone-use habits, and several years of changing my own reading patterns. Every source was independently verified against the URLs listed below on 2026-05-31. See our editorial standards and affiliate disclosure for how recommendations are made. This is the wry-register companion to the rest of our reading-habit shelf — and a reminder that the sanctuary chair is, statistically, not where most of the actual reading happens.

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