easyreading - essential steps

Almost everyone wishes they read more books than they do. The average person finishes only a handful a year, not because they lack interest but because they have never set up their life to make reading happen. Reading more is not about heroic willpower or superhuman speed; it is about a set of practical moves that quietly add up to dozens of books over a year. This guide lays out the essential steps that turn "I wish I read more" into a stack of finished books.

Want expert help putting this into practice? EasyReading can guide you through it.

Do the math on small daily reading

The scale of what consistent reading achieves surprises most people, and understanding it is genuinely motivating. The average reader moves through a page in a couple of minutes, and most books run around three hundred pages. That means just twenty minutes of reading a day adds up to roughly twenty books a year.

This math reframes the whole challenge. You do not need to carve out long, rare stretches of free time; you need a modest daily amount that compounds. Twenty minutes is the length of a coffee break, a short commute, or the time you might otherwise spend scrolling before bed. Seen this way, reading a book a fortnight is not an ambitious feat but the natural result of a small, steady habit anyone can sustain. The reason so few people reach these numbers is not that the time does not exist but that it arrives in fragments, scattered through the day and easily surrendered to a phone. Reclaiming those fragments, rather than waiting for a rare free afternoon, is the entire secret to reading a lot.

Always have a book within reach

Related: easyreading - essential steps to improve your reading habits.

The biggest source of lost reading time is not a lack of hours; it is not having a book available when the hours appear. Life is full of small gaps, in waiting rooms, in queues, on transport, between tasks, and these add up to enormous amounts of time that most people fill by scrolling. A reader fills them with pages.

• Carry a physical book or loaded e-reader with you everywhere.
• Keep an audiobook ready for walks, chores, and driving.
• Put a book where you wait: by the kettle, in the car, beside the bath.
• Store reading apps on your phone so it becomes a reading device, not just a distraction.

When a book is always within reach, those scattered minutes convert into real reading. Over a year, capturing even a fraction of your idle moments can add several books to your total without setting aside any dedicated time at all.

Set a specific, visible reading goal

Vague intentions produce vague results. "Read more" gives your mind nothing to aim at, while a specific number gives you a target and a way to measure progress. A concrete goal turns reading from a wish into a project you are actively pursuing.

Decide how many books you want to read this year, choosing a number that stretches you a little without feeling impossible. Then make progress visible: track finished books in a notebook, an app, or a simple list on your wall. Watching the count climb is genuinely motivating, and a visible tally quietly nudges you to pick up a book instead of the remote. If a yearly number feels daunting, break it into a monthly target, which is easier to keep in view and adjust.

Read faster on the material that allows it

See also: Easyreading - Essential Steps for Better Comprehension.

You do not need dramatic speed-reading claims to read meaningfully faster on suitable material. Modest, honest improvements in pace let you cover more books without sacrificing understanding, as long as you apply them to the right texts and not to material that demands slow, careful attention.

Two habits help most. First, stop rereading lines out of anxiety; your eyes constantly drift backward, and consciously pushing forward recovers a surprising amount of time. Second, use your finger or a pen as a pacer, sweeping smoothly under each line to keep your eyes moving steadily rather than jumping around. For lighter nonfiction and straightforward prose, these techniques noticeably lift your pace. Save your slow, deliberate reading for the dense or beautiful passages that truly deserve it, and let yourself move briskly through the rest.

Quit books that stall you

One dull book can sink an entire year of reading. When you feel obligated to finish everything you start, a single tedious read becomes a roadblock: you avoid it, read nothing else, and lose momentum for months. The readers who finish the most books are ruthless about abandoning the ones that are not working.

Give yourself an explicit rule: if a book has not gripped you after fifty pages or so, you may set it aside without guilt and move on. There are far more good books than you will ever have time for, and time spent slogging through a bad one is time stolen from a great one. Quitting freely keeps you always reading something you enjoy, which keeps your pace and enthusiasm high. Finishing more books often means finishing fewer of the wrong ones.

Read more than one book at a time

The conventional wisdom that you should finish one book before starting another actually holds many readers back. Your appetite for reading shifts with your mood and energy, and having only one option means that when it does not fit the moment, you read nothing at all. Keeping several books going solves this.

• Pair a demanding book with a lighter one for tired evenings.
• Keep a fiction and a nonfiction going at once for variety.
• Match the book to the setting: audio for moving around, print for focused sitting.

With a small rotation, there is always a book that suits your current state, so you rarely find yourself between books doing nothing. This flexibility, more than any other single trick, keeps the pages turning week after week. A tool like EasyReading can help you keep track of your rotation and your progress, but the essential steps are these simple, repeatable moves that anyone can start today and see multiply into a genuinely well-read year.