Last year, I read 67 books. The year before that, 41. The year before that, maybe 15. I didn’t get faster at reading. I didn’t take a speed-reading course or install some app that flashes words at me one at a time. What changed was simpler than that, and I think it’s something most people could replicate if they stopped obsessing over speed and started paying attention to habit.

The speed-reading industry has been selling people a fantasy for decades. The pitch is seductive: learn to read 1,000 words per minute and you’ll tear through books like paper. There are courses, seminars, YouTube channels, and entire businesses built on this promise. The problem is that it doesn’t work. Or rather, it works in the sense that you can technically move your eyes across pages faster, but comprehension drops off a cliff. Research from cognitive scientists has been pretty clear on this: above about 400 words per minute, most people start losing the thread. Speed reading is really just speed skimming, which is a useful skill for certain kinds of material but a terrible way to read a novel.

I know this because I tried it. In my early twenties, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with productivity optimization. I read Tim Ferriss, I tried the Pomodoro technique, I experimented with polyphasic sleep (terrible idea, by the way). Naturally, I also tried speed reading. I bought a course, practiced the techniques, and managed to get my reading speed up to something like 600 words per minute. I felt very accomplished. I also couldn’t remember anything I read. I’d finish a book and have only a vague sense of what it was about. The words had passed through me like water through a sieve.

So I gave up on reading faster and started thinking about reading more. Those sound like the same thing, but they’re not. Reading faster means cramming more words into each hour. Reading more means creating more hours in which reading happens. The first is a compression problem. The second is a scheduling problem. And scheduling problems, it turns out, are much easier to solve.

The single biggest change I made was identifying dead time. Not free time, dead time. The difference matters. Free time is a block on your calendar where nothing is scheduled. Dead time is the minutes scattered throughout your day that you currently fill with nothing useful: waiting in line, sitting in a waiting room, riding the bus, standing on the subway platform, lying in bed before sleep takes you. Most people have 30 to 90 minutes of dead time per day. They spend it scrolling their phones, which is fine as a choice, but it’s a choice, not an inevitability.

I started filling dead time with reading. I put a book in my bag every morning. I kept one on my nightstand. I loaded my phone’s Kindle app with whatever I was reading so I always had it available. I didn’t set goals or track minutes. I just made the book the default option for any moment where I had nothing else to do. Waiting for a friend at a restaurant? Book. Doctor’s office? Book. Can’t sleep? Book (though this one can backfire if the book is too good).

The math is surprisingly generous. If you read at an average pace of 250 words per minute and you find 30 minutes of dead time per day, that’s 7,500 words per day. A typical novel is around 80,000 words. That means you’d finish a book roughly every 11 days, or about 33 books per year, just from dead time. You haven’t given up a single evening. You haven’t canceled any plans. You’ve just redirected time you were already spending on nothing into something you (presumably) enjoy.

The second change was quitting books I wasn’t enjoying. This one was harder for me than you might think, because I was raised in a household where abandoning a book was considered a moral failing. My mother would finish every book she started, even if she hated it, because “you might miss something good at the end.” I operated under this principle for years, grinding through mediocre novels out of a sense of obligation, and it was killing my reading habit. Nothing makes you dread picking up a book like knowing you’re going to be bored.

I now follow what I call the 50-page rule, though it’s more of a guideline. If a book hasn’t grabbed me by page 50, I stop. Life is short. There are more great books than I could ever read. Spending eight hours finishing something I’m not enjoying is eight hours I could have spent on something I love. Some people set the threshold at 100 pages. Others go by percentage. The specific number doesn’t matter. What matters is giving yourself permission to stop. Once I started doing this, my reading speed effectively doubled, because I was no longer slogging through books that didn’t engage me.

The third change was mixing formats. I used to be a purist about physical books. There’s something about the weight of a hardcover, the smell of the pages, the satisfaction of watching your bookmark migrate from front to back. I still love that experience. But insisting on it exclusively was limiting how much I could read. Physical books are heavy, fragile, and hard to read in low light. They require two hands. They don’t fit in a pants pocket.

E-readers solved most of these problems. My Kindle goes everywhere. It’s backlit, so I can read in bed without disturbing anyone. It weighs nothing. I can hold it with one hand while standing on a train. I can adjust the font size when my eyes are tired. I resisted e-readers for years because they felt like a betrayal of “real” books. Getting over that snobbery was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a reader.

Audiobooks were the bigger revelation, though. I was skeptical of audiobooks for a long time. It didn’t feel like “real” reading. I worried I wouldn’t retain as much. But I started listening during my commute, while cooking, while doing laundry, while walking the dog. Suddenly, activities that had been dead time became reading time. A 40-minute commute each way is an hour and 20 minutes of reading per day. That alone gets you through a standard audiobook in about a week. Over the course of a year, my commute alone accounts for roughly 15 to 20 books.

The retention concern, by the way, turned out to be mostly unfounded. Research on audiobook comprehension is mixed, but my personal experience is that I remember audiobooks about as well as physical books, provided I’m paying attention. The key caveat is “paying attention.” I can’t listen to an audiobook while doing something cognitively demanding. Writing, coding, having a conversation: these activities are incompatible with audiobook listening. But passive physical tasks, cooking, cleaning, walking, driving on a familiar route, pair beautifully with listening.

I’ve also found that certain books work better in certain formats. Dense nonfiction with lots of data and arguments? Physical book or e-reader, so I can go back and re-read passages. Memoirs and narrative nonfiction? Audiobook, especially if the author narrates (hearing someone tell their own story in their own voice is a qualitatively different experience). Genre fiction? E-reader, because I tend to read these quickly and don’t need to linger over sentences. Literary fiction? Physical book, because the prose itself is part of the pleasure and I want to control the pace.

The fourth change was building a reading environment. By this I mean both a physical environment and a psychological one. Physically, I created a spot in my home that’s designated for reading. It’s an armchair next to a window with a good lamp. There’s no TV visible from that chair. My phone charger is in another room. When I sit in that chair, my brain knows what’s about to happen. It’s Pavlovian, honestly. The chair means reading time. After a few weeks of consistency, I found I could focus more easily there than anywhere else.

The psychological environment matters just as much. I stopped treating reading as something I do when there’s nothing better to do. I started treating it as an activity I schedule, the same way I schedule exercise or dinner with friends. “I’m going to read from 9 to 10 PM” became a normal sentence in my household. My partner knows not to interrupt during that hour. It sounds rigid, but the structure actually freed me. I stopped feeling guilty about reading when I “should” be doing something else, because reading had its own designated time.

The fifth change was managing my reading list intentionally. For years, my to-read list was a chaotic pile of recommendations, impulse purchases, and half-remembered titles from articles. I’d stand in front of my bookshelf feeling overwhelmed by options and often default to re-reading something comfortable instead. The paradox of choice is real, and it applies to reading as much as anything.

Now I keep a simple list with three categories: currently reading (never more than three at a time), next up (five books I’ve committed to reading next), and someday (everything else). When I finish a book, I pick the next one from my “next up” list without deliberation. No browsing, no agonizing. The decision was made in advance. This eliminates the friction between books, which is where a lot of reading momentum dies. People finish a book, don’t know what to read next, and end up not reading for days or weeks while they decide.

Speaking of momentum: reading begets reading. This is something nobody talks about enough. When you’re in the middle of a book you love, you find time to read. You stay up late. You read at breakfast. You sneak a chapter during lunch. But when you’re between books or stuck in something dull, reading drops off your priority list entirely. The goal isn’t to read faster. The goal is to stay in that state of engagement as much as possible. Every trick I’ve described, filling dead time, quitting bad books, mixing formats, scheduling reading time, managing your list, is really about maintaining momentum.

I want to address the guilt factor, because I think it stops more people from reading than any practical obstacle. Many of the people who tell me “I don’t have time to read” actually do have time. They just feel like they should spend it on something more “productive.” Reading a novel feels indulgent when the dishes are dirty, the inbox is full, and there’s a to-do list as long as your arm. I understand this feeling. I battle it myself. But I’ve come to believe that reading is productive in ways that don’t show up on a to-do list. It makes you a better thinker, a more empathetic person, and a more interesting conversationalist. It reduces stress. It improves focus. It’s one of the few activities that makes you simultaneously more relaxed and more alert.

There’s also the question of what counts as reading. Some people feel that only literary fiction “counts,” that reading thrillers or romance or science fiction is somehow less valuable. This attitude is both snobbish and counterproductive. Read whatever you enjoy. A person who reads 30 romance novels a year is a better reader than a person who reads zero literary novels because they’re too intimidated to start. Genre fiction develops the same reading muscles as literary fiction. It improves vocabulary, comprehension, and cognitive empathy. If you enjoy it, it counts. Period.

I should mention that these strategies work for nonfiction too, with some modifications. Nonfiction is generally easier to read in short bursts, since chapters tend to be more self-contained. It’s also more amenable to skimming. Not all nonfiction deserves a cover-to-cover read. Some books have one or two great chapters padded with filler. With nonfiction, I give myself permission to skip around, read the chapters that interest me, and put the book down once I’ve gotten the main ideas. This isn’t cheating. It’s efficiency. Most nonfiction authors would tell you the same thing. They know their books have varying chapter quality. They wrote the whole thing because publishers want 60,000 words, not because every chapter is equally important.

A few specific practical tips that have helped me. Keep your phone in another room during designated reading time. If that’s not possible, turn off notifications. The gravitational pull of a notification badge is almost impossible to resist, and once you pick up your phone “just to check,” you’ve lost 20 minutes. Buy books slightly faster than you read them, so you always have a queue. Return library books before the due date so you have motivation to finish them. Join a book club if external accountability helps you (it helps some people enormously and annoys others, so your mileage may vary). And read before bed instead of watching a screen. The blue light from screens disrupts sleep; the gentle focus of reading promotes it. I fall asleep faster on nights I read than nights I watch TV, and it’s not close.

The payoff for all of this isn’t just a higher book count, though the number is satisfying in an abstract way. The real payoff is that reading becomes a natural part of your life rather than an occasional hobby you feel guilty about neglecting. When reading is woven into your daily routine, you stop thinking about “finding time to read” the same way you don’t think about “finding time to eat.” It just happens. It’s what you do with certain parts of your day. Getting to that point doesn’t require reading faster. It requires removing the friction, guilt, and decision fatigue that keep you from reading at all. The speed you read at is fine. It’s always been fine. What needs to change is everything around it.