How to read more books: a plan that fits a busy week

What minutes buy

Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language pooled 190 studies and 18,573 participants. It puts the average silent reading rate for adults in English at 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. For non-fiction, most adults fall between 175 and 300.

The table uses 238 words per minute, a 75,000-word book as an example length, and a reading day every day of the year. These are our own sums, so your book and your speed will change the result. Use fewer days and the books drop in proportion.

• 10 minutes a day: about 12 books a year.
• 15 minutes a day: about 17 books a year.
• 20 minutes a day: about 23 books a year.
• 30 minutes a day: about 35 books a year.
• 45 minutes a day: about 52 books a year.
• 60 minutes a day: about 70 books a year.

Where the time hides

The Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey for 2025 found that Americans age 15 and over spent about 5.2 hours a day on leisure and sports, and 2.6 hours of that on watching TV. People also spent 37 minutes a day playing games or using a computer for leisure, which includes social media. Ages 35 to 44 had the least leisure time, 3.9 hours.

You do not need to give all of that up. A 15-minute slot is a small fraction of it. Look for it in the same few places: the first 15 minutes after waking, a commute you do not drive, a lunch break, or the time between dinner and bed.

Habit cues that work

A 1999 paper in American Psychologist by Gollwitzer describes implementation intentions: plans that link a situation to an action in the form of whenever situation x arises, I will do y. The research shows that such plans further the attainment of goals. So write the plan down, for example: after I pour my coffee, I read 10 pages.

A study by Lally and colleagues, published in 2010, followed 96 volunteers who repeated a daily behavior in the same context for 12 weeks. The time to reach the limit of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days, so it can take a long time, and missing one opportunity did not materially affect the process. A single missed day is not the end of a habit.

Make the book easy to open

Keep the book where you will be at your cue: on the pillow, by the coffee maker, in your bag. Leave a bookmark in it. Put the phone in another room for the first 15 minutes, since a phone competes with the book.

Choose books you want to finish. Dropping one that bores you is fine. The same minutes go further on a book you want to keep reading.

What to do on bad days

Have a smaller version of the habit, such as one page or five minutes, so the cue still gets used on a busy day. Doing the small version keeps the pattern in place, and Lally's data suggests a missed day is not fatal.

On days with no time at all, a short lesson can keep you in contact with a book’s ideas. It is not the same as reading the book, and a lesson does not replace the author’s full argument. It is a way to keep a bad day from ending the week.

Why it is worth doing

A Pew Research Center survey from January and February 2021 found that 23% of American adults had not read a book, in whole or in part, in print, electronic or audio form in the previous year. Reading even one book a month puts you well past that group.

If you want to test your own pace, time yourself on a page you have not read at your normal speed and divide the words by the minutes. Our free reading time calculator does this and then shows when you would finish a book at your daily pace.