Eleven Pages in Three Weeks
Reading time doesn't appear on its own. It has to be made — and making it requires treating it like it matters.
There's a book on my bedside table that has been on my bedside table for three weeks. I've read eleven pages. I know exactly why I picked it up those eleven pages in and then put it back down, because the same thing happens every time: it's late, I'm tired, and there are approximately forty other things I could be doing with the fifteen minutes I have before sleep.
I used to tell myself I didn't have time to read anymore. It took me a while to notice that I was spending considerably more time than that scrolling through things I couldn't remember five minutes later.
The time was there. I was just giving it to something else.
Why it keeps slipping
Reading asks something that most of our other leisure activities don't. It asks for sustained, uninterrupted attention. Not the fragmented kind, not the half-attention you can give something while simultaneously doing three other things, but the full kind. The kind where you're actually inside a story rather than adjacent to it.
That kind of attention has become genuinely harder to access, not because we've become less capable of it, but because we've spent years training our brains to prefer the shorter feedback loops. The scroll. The skip. The next episode starting automatically before the previous one has properly settled.
Reading asks you to sit with one thing. That's a skill that needs a little maintenance, and most of us have let it get rusty.
Making the time rather than finding it
The framing matters here. Finding time suggests there's a pocket of it somewhere that you just need to locate. Making time is more honest — it means deciding that this thing is going to happen, and adjusting something else accordingly.
For me that meant being deliberate about the thirty minutes after dinner that I was previously spending on my phone without much intention. Not every night. Not as a rigid rule. Just the decision that sometimes that time would go to a book instead, and that this was a reasonable thing to do with it.
That's genuinely all it took. Twenty to thirty minutes a day adds up to several books a month. Not because I found hidden time, but because I redirected time I already had.
The right book for the right moment
It also helps to be honest about what you can actually read when. A dense, demanding novel requires a different quality of attention than a collection of short essays. If your reading windows are short and your brain is often tired, starting with something that rewards brief reading sessions rather than fighting it makes the habit much easier to sustain.
I keep two books going at once now — one for when I have proper time and attention, one for the gaps. It sounds like it would create confusion. It doesn't. It just means there's always something that fits the moment I'm actually in rather than the moment I intended to be in.
Letting go of the finish line
There's a particular kind of reader guilt that comes from having too many unfinished books and not enough completed ones. I've felt it often enough. But reading isn't a productivity exercise. There's no metric that matters except whether the time you spent with a book was worth spending.
Some books deserve to be abandoned. Some deserve to be read slowly over months. Some will be finished in a weekend because you simply couldn't put them down. All of those are legitimate reading lives. The only version that isn't working is the one where the books just sit on the table, unread, because the time never quite materialised.
How do you make time to read — or are you also at war with your own bedside pile? I'd genuinely love to know what's worked for you.
Warmly, Evelyn
No comments:
Post a Comment