How to read more: ten pages a day and other small fixes

To read more, read a small, fixed amount every day (ten pages is plenty) and make the book easier to reach than your phone. Ten pages a day adds up to about 3,650 pages a year, roughly a dozen 300-page books. The time is probably already in your day, hiding in the minutes you currently spend scrolling.

The math of ten pages

Ten pages sounds like nothing, and that's exactly why it works. It's too small for "I don't have time" to be true.

How long is it, really? A 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University estimated that adults read English silently at about 238 words per minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction. At that pace, ten pages of a typical novel take somewhere around ten to fifteen minutes. That's one coffee, one bus ride, or one fewer trip through videos you won't remember tomorrow.

Over a year:

• 5 pages a day: about 1,825 pages, or six 300-page books.
• 10 pages a day: about 3,650 pages, or twelve.
• 20 pages a day: about 7,300 pages, or twenty-four.

Compare that with the plan of reading for two hours every Sunday, which tends to last exactly one Sunday. A small daily amount at a fixed moment is what turns reading into a habit instead of an event, the same way it works for any habit you want to keep.

Keep a book within arm's reach

Half the battle against the phone is distance. The phone is in your hand; the book is on a shelf in another room. Close the gap:

• Carry one everywhere. A paperback in the bag, plus an e-book app on your phone for the days the paperback stayed home.
• Put books where you sit. One on the nightstand, one by the couch. One in the bathroom, if we're being honest about where reading time hides.
• Use the dead time. Waiting rooms, lines, the commute, the ten minutes before a meeting starts. Those gaps can easily add up to more than ten pages a day.
• Have the next book ready. The gap between finishing one book and choosing the next is where reading habits go to sleep. Keep a short list of what's next.

Get the phone out of the bedroom

For a lot of people, the easiest reading slot is the 15 minutes before sleep, and right now the phone owns it. Take it back: charge the phone in another room, use a cheap alarm clock, and leave the book on your pillow so you have to pick it up to get into bed. The first few nights your hand will reach for the nightstand out of habit. Give it a week.

Paper has a bonus at night. In a sleep-lab study published in 2015, led by Anne-Marie Chang, twelve adults read for four hours before bed on an iPad for five nights and from a printed book for five nights. After the iPad nights, they took longer to fall asleep and were less alert the next morning. Your fifteen minutes aren't four hours, but it's one more reason to make the bedtime book a printed one.

If the phone keeps winning anyway, how to stop scrolling has the friction tricks, and a night routine gives the book a permanent spot in your evening.

Give reading a cue

A habit needs a trigger, a moment that tells you "now." Reading is easiest to anchor to something you already do every day:

• After brushing your teeth at night, read in bed.
• With the first coffee, ten pages before you open any messages.
• On the bus or train, the book comes out before the phone does.
• At lunch, the last ten minutes belong to the book.

Pick one and write it down as "after X, I read." That's the whole idea behind habit stacking, and it works because the old habit reminds you of the new one.

If you'd rather have someone keep you honest, Toxic Coach lets you set a reading goal with a deadline, and the reminders get less polite as the deadline gets closer.

Quit the books you don't like

Few things stall a reading habit like a book you're forcing yourself through. You stop reading it, but you don't start anything else either, because you "have to finish this first." Weeks pass. The bookmark doesn't move.

And if the last book you finished was assigned in high school, it makes sense that reading still feels like homework. The fix is the same in both cases: permission to let go.

The French writer Daniel Pennac put that permission in writing in Comme un roman (1992), an essay that ends with a list of the reader's rights. Number three is the right not to finish a book. The same list includes the right to skip pages, to reread, to read anything and to read anywhere.

If you want a more concrete rule, Nancy Pearl, a Seattle librarian and book critic, has a well-known one she calls the rule of 50: give a book 50 pages, and if you're not enjoying it by then, put it down without guilt. Readers over 50 subtract their age from 100, and that's their number of pages.

A library card makes all of this cheaper. A free book you abandon on page 40 costs you exactly 40 pages and nothing else.

And read what you enjoy: thrillers, fantasy, romance, comics, biographies. A habit is built on books you want to pick up. Nobody is grading you.

Yes, audiobooks count

If your free time happens mostly in the car, on foot or at the sink, listen. In a 2016 study, Beth Rogowsky, Barbara Calhoun and Paula Tallal randomly assigned 91 people to read the opening of a nonfiction book (the preface and one chapter), listen to it as an audiobook, or do both at once. Comprehension didn't differ significantly between the groups, either right after or two weeks later.

Two caveats from common sense rather than from that study: your attention is split while you drive, so save complex books for when you can rewind, and dense material you need to study is easier to go back over on the page. For a novel, a memoir or a popular science book, your ears are fine.

Tonight's ten pages

Choose a book you actually want to read, not the one you think you should. If nothing comes to mind, good first picks for a new habit are a novel a friend couldn't put down, a favorite you've already read once, or a short book you can finish within a week, so the first win comes early.

Put it on your pillow and charge your phone in the kitchen. Read ten pages before you sleep, and stop there even if you want more. Stopping while you still want more makes tomorrow's ten pages the easiest ones you'll read all week.