How to Make Time to Read When the News Never Stops

If you want to know how to make time to read, start by admitting you won’t find the time — you’ll have to trade for it. Almost nobody has a spare hour lying around. But most of us have twenty or thirty minutes a day going somewhere that leaves us more wound up than when we started. Trade one scroll session for one chapter and you’ll finish two or three books a month without adding a single minute to your day.

Why is it so hard to make time to read anymore?

Because the feed is engineered to feel urgent and a novel is not. A headline promises a payoff in four seconds. A chapter asks you to hold one thread for thirty minutes and trust that it’s going somewhere. That’s a muscle, and a lot of us have let it go soft — not because we got lazy, but because we spent three years training the other one.

How to make time to read: three swaps that actually work

• Anchor it to something you already do. Coffee, the train, the ten minutes before lights out. A habit with a trigger survives; a habit that needs willpower doesn’t.
• Put the book where the phone isn’t. On the nightstand, in the bag, on the kitchen counter. Proximity beats intention almost every time.
• Lower the bar to ten pages. Ten pages is unskippable even on a bad day, and ten pages a night is roughly a book a month. The goal is the streak, not the sprint.

What should I read when I only have twenty minutes?

Something with short chapters and a reason to turn the page. That’s part of why political thrillers travel so well in a busy season — the chapters are built to end on a hook, which means twenty minutes gets you a full beat instead of half a scene. If you want to test the habit on something free, grab The Senate Deception; if it takes, What It Takes to Kill a Bull Moose is where the series proper begins, and the reading order page lays out the rest.

Here’s what I’d actually like to know, because I’m asked this more than almost anything else: when do you read? Early morning, lunch break, the last twenty minutes of the day? Leave a comment — the answers are usually more useful than any advice I could give you.

Further reading: Reading (Wikipedia)

Frequently asked questions

How many minutes a day do you need to read a book a month? About fifteen to twenty minutes, or roughly ten pages a night. At that pace most readers finish a 350-page novel in four to five weeks without changing anything else about their schedule.

Does reading before bed actually help? For most people, yes — it is a reliable trigger, and a printed book or e-ink reader avoids the bright screen that keeps you up. The catch is fatigue, so if you keep rereading the same page, move your reading block earlier in the day.

What kind of book is best when you only have short windows to read? Books with short chapters and strong chapter-end hooks. Thrillers, mysteries, and most commercial fiction are built this way, which makes them easier to pick back up after a day or two away.

Want a political thriller you can’t put down? Claim your free copy of The Senate Deception, the award-winning prequel to the Bull Moose series — and join 3,000+ readers who never miss a release.

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About the author: Michael Fedor is the award-winning author of the Bull Moose political thriller series. Drawing on 20 years inside politics and campaigns, he writes pulse-pounding fiction about power, democracy, and the fragile machinery of the republic.