The real question is not how to find time for reading. It is how to stop pretending you do not have it. Most people who say they have no time to read spend two or three hours a day on their phone, scrolling through content that vanishes from memory within minutes. The time exists. The issue is that reading requires a kind of sustained attention that feels more demanding than passive consumption, even though it is far more rewarding.
The most effective approach I have found comes from a principle Naval Ravikant describes simply: treat reading like breathing. It should not be an event you schedule or a goal you set. It should be something you do whenever there is a gap. Waiting rooms, commutes, the ten minutes before sleep, the fifteen minutes during lunch. These fragments add up faster than you expect. Twenty pages a day, which takes most people about thirty minutes, puts you through roughly twenty-five books a year. That is more than most people read in a decade.
The mistake many people make is treating reading as an obligation rather than a pleasure. Naval makes a point of reading whatever interests him, abandoning books freely if they lose his attention, and reading multiple books simultaneously. This sounds undisciplined, but it is actually the opposite. It removes the friction that kills reading habits — the feeling that you must finish something boring before you are allowed to start something interesting. Give yourself permission to quit books. You will paradoxically read more, not less.
Dorie Clark offers a complementary insight in her concept of white space. She argues that before you can do anything meaningful — including read — you must stop being perpetually busy. Busyness, she notes, is often an anesthetic. It protects us from uncomfortable questions about who we are and what we actually want. Creating space for reading is really creating space for thinking, and that requires saying no to things that feel productive but are merely urgent.
A practical strategy that works well is habit stacking — attaching reading to something you already do. If you eat breakfast every morning, read during breakfast. If you commute by train, that is reading time. If you have a cup of tea before bed, that is when you read. The key is not willpower but architecture. You are not adding a new task to your day. You are replacing a less valuable activity with a more valuable one in a slot that already exists.
One more thing worth mentioning. Bob Deutsch, a cognitive neuroscientist, writes about curiosity as an inborn quality that gets suppressed by routine. When reading feels like a chore, it usually means you are reading the wrong things. Genuine curiosity makes time irrelevant. When you find a book that genuinely captivates you, you do not struggle to find time for it. You struggle to put it down. The search for time is often really a search for the right book.