I used to read for three hours straight without looking at my phone. I know this because I remember doing it. I remember sinking into a novel on a Saturday afternoon and surfacing only when the light changed. Now I read for twenty minutes and then check something. Email. A notification. The weather, as if the weather has changed since I last looked. It is embarrassing to admit, but I think most honest readers would say the same.

This is not a moral failing. It is an environmental one. Our attention has been engineered into a commodity by companies that profit from interrupting us, and reading, which requires sustained focus, is one of the casualties. As a publisher, I think about this constantly. Not because I want to moralize about screen time, but because the books we publish at ScrollWorks Media require the kind of attention that is becoming harder to give.

What follows is not a lecture. It is a collection of practical strategies that have helped me, our team, and readers we have talked to reclaim some of the deep reading capacity that the digital environment has eroded. Some of these are obvious. Some are counterintuitive. All of them work, if you actually do them.

The Problem Is Real and Measured

Before getting into solutions, I want to acknowledge the research. This is not imagined. Studies from multiple universities over the past decade have documented a measurable decline in sustained reading capacity among adults. Average reading session lengths have shortened. The number of books read per year has declined in most demographic groups. Self-reported difficulty concentrating on long texts has increased.

The reasons are well understood. Smartphones deliver variable-reward stimulation (you never know what notification is coming next, which makes checking addictive). Social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement, which means maximizing the frequency with which you return to the app. Even email, which seems benign, trains a constant monitoring habit that fragments attention throughout the day.

The result is that many adults who consider themselves readers have gradually lost the ability to sustain attention on a book for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. They still buy books. They still intend to read them. But the books accumulate on nightstands and in Kindle libraries, partially read or unstarted, while the phone gets picked up a hundred times a day.

I recognize the irony of writing about this in a blog post, which is itself a digital medium competing for your attention. But here we are. Let me try to be useful.

Strategy One: Create a Physical Separation

The single most effective thing I have done for my reading life is put my phone in another room when I sit down with a book. Not in my pocket. Not face-down on the table. In another room, with the door closed.

This sounds simplistic, but the psychology behind it is solid. When your phone is within reach, part of your brain is always aware of it. Even if it is silenced, even if it is face-down, you know it is there. That ambient awareness creates a low-level distraction that competes with whatever you are reading. Removing the phone from your physical space eliminates that competition.

The first few times I did this, I felt anxious. That anxiety was informative. It told me something about my relationship with the device that I was not comfortable acknowledging. After about a week, the anxiety faded. After a month, the reading sessions got longer. I went from twenty-minute stretches to forty-five minutes and then to an hour or more. The capacity was still there. It just needed the interference removed.

Some people use physical book reading as the enforcing mechanism. If you read on a Kindle, the temptation to switch apps or check notifications is built into the device. A physical book has no notifications. It does one thing. For readers who struggle with distraction, print books are not a nostalgic preference. They are a practical tool.

Strategy Two: Schedule Reading Like You Schedule Exercise

Most people who exercise regularly do not wait until they feel like exercising. They have a time and a routine. Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Every day after work. The commitment is built into their schedule, and showing up is non-negotiable even when motivation is low.

Reading benefits from the same approach. If you wait until you feel like reading, you will probably end up scrolling instead, because scrolling requires less activation energy. But if you have a designated reading time, even a short one, the habit builds on itself.

At ScrollWorks, several team members have adopted a “reading hour” before bed. No screens after 9 PM; books only. Clara, our senior editor, told me she resisted this initially because she liked watching shows in the evening. After two weeks, she noticed she was sleeping better and reading more. She has kept the habit for over a year.

The specific time matters less than the consistency. Some people read in the morning before the day’s noise starts. Some read during lunch. The important thing is that the time is protected. It is not “I will read if I have time.” It is “this is my reading time.” The framing makes a difference.

Strategy Three: Start With Shorter Books

If you have not finished a book in months, do not start with a 600-page novel. This is like trying to run a marathon when you have not jogged in a year. You will fail, and the failure will reinforce the idea that you cannot focus anymore.

Instead, start with something short. A novella. A collection of essays. A book under 200 pages. Give yourself the experience of finishing something, of reaching the last page and closing the cover. That feeling of completion is motivating. It rebuilds your identity as a reader, which matters more than you might think.

Our publicist Rachel suggested a book to a friend who had not finished a book in over a year. It was short, under 180 pages, and her friend read it in three sittings over a weekend. “I forgot I could do that,” her friend said afterward. She has read four more books since then, each one slightly longer than the last. The momentum is real.

I also think there is no shame in abandoning a book that is not working for you. Life is too short and there are too many good books. If you are fifty pages in and dreading picking it up, stop. Find something that pulls you forward instead of requiring effort to continue. Reading should not feel like homework. If it does, you are reading the wrong book.

Strategy Four: Read What You Actually Want to Read

This is related to the previous point but deserves its own discussion. I have noticed that many people who struggle to read are trying to read what they think they should read rather than what they actually want to read. They have a list of Important Books that they feel obligated to tackle, and the obligation turns reading into a chore.

Read the thriller. Read the romance. Read the graphic novel. Read the sports biography. Read whatever makes you want to turn the page. The goal right now is to rebuild the reading habit, and the habit is built on pleasure, not virtue. Once the habit is established, you can gradually expand into more challenging territory. But starting with the “important” books when your reading muscles are atrophied is a recipe for frustration.

I say this as someone who publishes literary fiction and serious non-fiction. I want people to read The Last Archive by Catherine Voss and The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo. But I would rather someone read a book they love in another genre and rebuild their reading habit than force themselves through one of our titles out of obligation and give up halfway through. A reader who devours popular fiction is more likely to eventually pick up literary fiction than a non-reader who feels guilty about their unread pile.

Strategy Five: Use Audiobooks Strategically

Audiobooks are divisive in the reading community, and I think the debate is often unproductive. The question is not “Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading?” It is “Does listening to audiobooks help me engage with more books?” For many people, the answer is yes.

Audiobooks fit into moments when print reading is impossible: commuting, exercising, cooking, doing laundry. These are hours in the day when your hands and eyes are occupied but your mind is free. Filling those hours with a good audiobook can add ten or fifteen hours of “reading” to your week without displacing any other activity.

I have also found that audiobooks can serve as on-ramps to print reading. When I listen to the first few chapters of a novel on audio and get hooked, I sometimes switch to the print edition because I want to read at my own pace and reread passages. The audio got me past the initial resistance, and the print edition took over once I was invested.

There are books where audio is the better format. Memoirs, in particular, often benefit from being read by the author. When Elena Marsh recorded the audiobook for Still Waters, readers told us the experience was different from the print edition in ways that enriched their understanding. The pauses, the inflections, the places where her voice caught: these added a layer that print cannot provide.

The key is not to treat audiobooks as a replacement for reading but as a complement. Use them for the moments when you cannot sit with a book. Use print or ebook for the moments when you can.

Strategy Six: Talk About What You Read

Reading in isolation is fine, but reading in community is better for building a sustainable habit. When you discuss a book with someone else, your engagement with it deepens. You notice things you missed. You see the book through another person’s eyes. And you have social accountability: if you are meeting for a book club next week, you are more likely to finish the book.

Book clubs are the obvious vehicle here, but they are not the only one. A friend who reads the same book as you and wants to text about it. A Goodreads community where you post updates. A family member who will listen to you explain why a particular chapter made you angry. Any social context that connects reading to conversation will strengthen the habit.

Online reading communities have their own distraction risks, of course. A Goodreads session can easily turn into a social media scrolling session. But used with intention, these platforms add a social dimension to reading that isolated reading lacks.

Strategy Seven: Reclaim Waiting Time

Before smartphones, people read during idle moments. Waiting rooms. Bus stops. Lunch breaks. Airport gates. These small pockets of time were filled with books, newspapers, and magazines. Now they are filled with phones.

Reclaiming even some of this time for reading can add up significantly. If you carry a book with you (or keep one on your phone’s ebook app), you can read during waits that would otherwise go to scrolling. Five minutes here, ten minutes there. It sounds trivial, but those fragments accumulate. Over the course of a week, they can add an hour or more of reading.

The trick is making the book more accessible than the phone. If you have to dig through your bag for a book but your phone is in your pocket, you will reach for the phone. Keep the book where you can grab it easily. Better yet, keep the phone in the bag and the book in your hand.

Strategy Eight: Lower the Stakes

Somewhere along the way, reading became a performance. People track their reading on apps, set annual goals (“I am going to read fifty books this year!”), and measure their progress publicly. While goals can be motivating, they can also create pressure that makes reading feel like an obligation.

If counting books stresses you out, stop counting. If your Goodreads goal is creating guilt, delete it. Read what you want, at the pace you want, without keeping score. The point of reading is the experience, not the number. A person who reads five books deeply and thinks about them for months afterward is a better reader than someone who speed-reads fifty and remembers none of them.

I also think rereading is undervalued. There are books I have read three or four times, and each reading gives me something new. A book like Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield rewards rereading because the historical details and the prose style reveal more on a second pass. Rereading is reading. It counts, if you are counting. And if you are not counting, it still matters.

What This Means for Publishers

I would be dishonest if I did not acknowledge that the attention crisis affects our business. We publish books that ask for sustained engagement. The Last Archive is a slow, deliberate novel that rewards patient reading. Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne asks readers to stick with complex material. These are not books you can absorb in five-minute increments.

As a publisher, I could respond to the attention crisis by publishing shorter, simpler books. There is a market for that, and I do not look down on publishers who serve it. But I believe the solution to diminished attention is not to accommodate it. It is to help people reclaim it. The world needs books that require sustained focus, because the problems the world faces require sustained focus. You cannot think carefully about history, or technology, or human relationships, in ten-second bursts.

So we will keep publishing the books we believe in, and we will keep looking for ways to help readers find the time and space to engage with them. If any of the strategies in this post help even one person read one more book this year, I will consider it time well spent.

Now put your phone in another room and go read something.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.