I’ve always imagined having a wonderful waking routine where I carve out a half hour each morning to read in my pajamas, espresso in hand, and the sound of the morning birds chirping just outside…

But I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve managed to make this happen.

On the one hand, waking earlier to make more time for any activity–be it reading, meditation, exercise, writing, etc.–is certainly effective because you prioritize the activity before the rest of the world wakes and begins to demand your time, after which you end up putting off what you wanted to do until “later” (and, of course, later never comes). On the other hand, you risk getting less sleep unless you make a concerted effort to shift your bedtime forward too; and let’s be honest: how many of us manage to do that with all the demands of everyday life and feeling time-squeezed as it is? We’re already so sleep-deprived as a nation, and I know that I am personally. Most of the time I decide it’s more important for me to get that extra half hour of snooze eye for the sake of my health, which is why I’ve hardly managed to make morning reading time a routine reality.

Making more time to read is the endless quest of every avid reader. We manage to read, but we never read enough.  There are just so many books we want to get to all at once!

Input! More input!!

So how can we read more, and how can we read faster?

• Wake Earlier. Yeah I know, I know. I just went over this. It’s still an option though, and the fact that I enjoy morning reading time so much means I’ll never give up on this! I just need to make sure I go to bed earlier too. We’re very prone to underestimating the negative effects of sleep loss. I can’t stress enough how important sleep is.
• Read More. Reading begets more reading begets even more reading. The more you practice, the faster you get. Simple as that. It’s a positive cycle, so jump on it.
• Exploit Every Minute and Every Medium. Waiting in line, eating lunch, on the stationary bike, commuting to work…these are all examples of primo reading time. Carry a book with you everywhere you go. Read while you eat your lunch. Read while you’re on a cardio machine at the gym. Read while you wait in line at the doctor’s office. While I prefer physical books, there are some books that I’m OK listening to, so I listen to audio downloads from my local library on my commute to work. My library also has a vast selection of eBooks, which I download to my Kindle app and these are my “on the go” books I read while waiting in line at Coffee Bean or waiting 2 minutes for my food to microwave. (This is how I can easily be reading 3 or more books at a time!) Most of us these days have our phones physically on us all hours of the day, so take advantage: rather than opening that Facebook app, open up the Kindle app. Retrain yourself to make the reading app the habitual thing you do, which brings me to…
• Consume Less Social Media, Which is like Junk Food for the Brain. People I know will easily spend a mindless hour on Facebook after work when they plop themselves on the couch from exhaustion. And then they insist they have no time to read books. Oh, they have time. They just prioritize social media over the important work that is making yourself a better human being by digging into the Great Conversation of the brightest minds in human history. It’s like prioritizing eating chips and cookies every night for dinner, rather than going through the effort to make a healthy meal.
  Think of social media as junk food, and books as the equally delicious healthy meals. Like junk food, social media is easy to consume because it comes in a nice, shiny package. Like taking the time to cook a healthy meal, books require more mental effort but bring more overall joy into your life. I go on Facebook too, and I love Instagram. I do eat the occasional vending machine bag of Doritos or cheese-slathered mac’n’cheese. But just as you want most of your meals to be healthy, do you really want the majority of the time you spend consuming the written word to consist of an endless Facebook news feed or “20 Signs You’re a __” BuzzFeed posts? Figure out what works best for you. Just be more aware and deliberate in your social media use, so it doesn’t steal precious minutes from your life. In this information age, when it’s so easy to get bombarded by lots of info-crap, we must make the effort to carefully curate what is allowed to take up our precious time and attention.

Because it is precious. Your time and attention matter, and reading matters.