Every 1 Minute a Day You Read = 1 Book a Year

People often ask me how they can read more books. The honest answer is: spend more time reading. There’s literally no other way. As you devote more time to it, you’re likely to become a faster reader too. But the follow-up question to that is always: how do I find more time?

We find time for whatever our priorities are. If you think you’re too busy to read, at all, it’s about making tradeoffs.

I’m currently on my 94th book this year (excluding the many I didn’t finish) which is far less than usual, though still requiring a reasonable time commitment. The tradeoff is that I watch very little TV and don’t use social media. If I did, I doubt I’d have time to read. As a kid I read up to 100 per month with the tradeoff being…that was all I did. All day.

Maths has never been my strong suit, but let’s do some semi-mangled Fermi calculations.

Let’s assume it takes a minute to read a page and the average book is 300 pages. If you read for 5 minutes per day, that’s 1825 minutes (30.4 hours) per year. Divide by 300 and that’s 6.1. The average person probably takes a bit more than a minute to read a page and some books may be longer, so let’s round it down to 5.

Five books a year is not many, but five minutes a day is nothing.

Five minutes. You’d spend five minutes deliberating over which pizza to order. Or staring at a coffee pot, waiting for it to heat up. Or reading an email from a supermarket. Or reading this article.

If we increase 5 minutes to 15 minutes a day, that’s 5475 minutes (91.3 hours) per year, equating to 18.25 300-page books, which we can again round down to 15.

You probably spend 15 minutes looking at your phone after waking up or before falling asleep. If you commute by train or bus that’s easily 15-minutes.

(If you’re about to start picking holes in my maths, please look up the definition of a Fermi calculation.)

Heuristics are imperfect. But the 1 minute a day = 1 book a year rule is useful for spotting little time slots in your routine you can use for reading. Instead of overlooking them, recognise that they do add up and you don’t need hours a day. Get into the mindset of turning dead time into alive time and making reading part of your routine.

I rarely set aside big blocks of time to read. I read while I eat. While traveling. Waiting in line. Sitting at the pharmacy for 2 hours waiting for a prescription to get filled. Before bed. It adds up.