How to Read More Books: 10 Rules That Actually Work

Q: How Do You Actually Build a Reading Habit?

Rule 1: The Pillow Rule. This is the single most impactful habit change you can make. Keep a Kindle or physical book on your bedside table — and charge your phone in a different room. That's it. When you get into bed, the only device within reach is your book. No Instagram. No Reddit. No doomscrolli

Q: How to Replace Social Media Scrolling With Reading

Rule 2: Redesign your phone's home screen. Think about what happens when you pick up your phone out of habit. Your thumb already knows where Instagram lives. That muscle memory is powerful — and it's working against you.

Q: How to Find Time to Read When You're Busy

Rule 3: The Multitasking Rule. A lot of people imagine that reading requires a leather armchair, total silence, and a free hour. That's not realistic for most of us. But here's what is realistic: audiobooks.

Q: Should You Read Multiple Books at Once?

Rule 4: Stop being a monogamous reader. One of the fastest ways to kill your reading momentum is forcing yourself to finish a book you're not in the mood for. The solution? Have multiple books on the go simultaneously.

Q: Is It Okay to Quit a Book You're Not Enjoying?

Rule 5: Give yourself permission to abandon books. School taught us that not finishing a book is failure. That's a terrible mindset for adult readers who are genuinely trying to read more.

Q: How Do You Gamify Reading to Stay Motivated?

Rule 7: Track your reading on Goodreads. There's something surprisingly motivating about seeing your books pile up on a list. Goodreads syncs with your Kindle automatically, which means your reading log basically builds itself. You get to see how many books you've read this year, rate and review the

Q: Can You Listen to Audiobooks Faster and Still Retain It?

Rule 8: Speed up your listening — and your reading. There is no rule that says you must listen to audiobooks at 1x speed. Start at 1.5x. Once that feels comfortable, try 1.75x or 2x. Your brain adapts faster than you'd think, and within a few weeks you'll find that normal speed actually feels slow.

Q: How to Make Buying Books a No-Brainer Habit

Rule 9: The impulse buy rule. When someone recommends a book — in a podcast, in a conversation, in a tweet — buy it immediately. Don't think about it. Don't add it to a list to revisit later. Just open your phone and get it.

Q: The Identity Shift That Changes Everything

Rule 10: Become a reader, not someone trying to read more. This is the deepest rule and the one that ties everything else together. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, identity drives behaviour. If you tell yourself "I'm not really a reader," your actions will follow that story.

If you want to read more books this year, the answer isn't willpower — it's design. Most people who struggle to read aren't lazy. They've just built an environment that makes scrolling TikTok infinitely easier than opening a book. The good news? You can flip that. These 10 rules are practical, proven, and will dramatically increase the number of books you finish — starting tonight.

How to Read More Books: 10 Rules That Work

The core insight behind all 10 of these rules is the same: reading more is less about motivation and more about removing the friction between you and a book. Let's get into it.

How Do You Actually Build a Reading Habit?

Rule 1: The Pillow Rule. This is the single most impactful habit change you can make. Keep a Kindle or physical book on your bedside table — and charge your phone in a different room. That's it. When you get into bed, the only device within reach is your book. No Instagram. No Reddit. No doomscrolling at midnight.

A Kindle is especially useful here because the built-in light means you don't need a separate reading lamp. But the real power of this rule is what it removes: the temptation to reach for your phone. When your phone is physically in another room, you stop fighting the urge to check it. The battle is won before it begins.

This is environment design at its most effective. You're not relying on discipline. You're engineering your surroundings so that the good habit — reading — becomes the default, and the bad habit — scrolling — becomes inconvenient.

How to Replace Social Media Scrolling With Reading

Rule 2: Redesign your phone's home screen. Think about what happens when you pick up your phone out of habit. Your thumb already knows where Instagram lives. That muscle memory is powerful — and it's working against you.

The fix is simple: remove social media apps from your home screen. You don't have to delete them entirely, but make them harder to reach. Then put the Kindle app front and centre — literally the first thing you see when you unlock your phone. Add a Kindle widget showing the book you're currently reading. Add an Audible widget too.

When the reading app is the first thing your eyes land on, it becomes the first thing you open. This is the same principle as the Pillow Rule — design your digital environment the same way you'd design your physical one. Make reading the path of least resistance.

How to Find Time to Read When You're Busy

Rule 3: The Multitasking Rule. A lot of people imagine that reading requires a leather armchair, total silence, and a free hour. That's not realistic for most of us. But here's what is realistic: audiobooks.

Washing the dishes, commuting, walking the dog, waiting in a queue — these are all reading opportunities in disguise. Pop your AirPods in and hit play. If you have even 30 minutes a day of hands-busy-brain-free time, you can add dozens of books to your year without changing your schedule at all.

This isn't about filling every moment with noise. It's about being intentional with the time that would otherwise be wasted. A two-hour daily commute, for example, could get you through 50+ books a year at a modest listening speed. That's transformative.

Should You Read Multiple Books at Once?

Rule 4: Stop being a monogamous reader. One of the fastest ways to kill your reading momentum is forcing yourself to finish a book you're not in the mood for. The solution? Have multiple books on the go simultaneously.

A practical setup might look like this:

One fiction audiobook on Audible
One non-fiction audiobook on Audible
One fiction ebook on Kindle
One non-fiction ebook on Kindle
One slower, reflective book (philosophy, spirituality) for bedtime

When you have options, you can match your reading to your energy. Exhausted after work? Pick the light fiction. Got bandwidth for ideas? Hit the non-fiction. This approach means you're almost never stuck — there's always something that fits where you are right now.

Is It Okay to Quit a Book You're Not Enjoying?

Rule 5: Give yourself permission to abandon books. School taught us that not finishing a book is failure. That's a terrible mindset for adult readers who are genuinely trying to read more.

If a book isn't gripping you, put it down. It's not your fault. It's not even the author's fault — it might just be the wrong book at the wrong time. Life is genuinely too short to battle through 400 pages of something that bores you. Move on without guilt, and pick up something you actually want to read.

Rule 6: Read what you love until you love to read. This is advice from Naval Ravikant, and it's some of the best reading advice in existence. A lot of people feel like they should be reading classics or serious non-fiction — and then wonder why reading feels like homework.

Start with what pulls you. Murder mysteries. Fantasy epics. Trashy romance. Page-turners that you physically cannot put down. Reading these kinds of books trains your attention, builds the reading habit, and — crucially — makes you actually enjoy reading. Once you love reading, you'll naturally want to challenge yourself with harder material. But you have to build the foundation first. Trying to start with Dickens when you haven't read in years is like walking into a gym for the first time and trying to bench press 100kg. Don't do it to yourself.

How Do You Gamify Reading to Stay Motivated?

Rule 7: Track your reading on Goodreads. There's something surprisingly motivating about seeing your books pile up on a list. Goodreads syncs with your Kindle automatically, which means your reading log basically builds itself. You get to see how many books you've read this year, rate and review them, and watch your numbers climb.

It's not about obsessing over quantity. But a little gamification goes a long way. The same reason you might track your runs or log your workouts applies here. Seeing the line go up feels good — and that good feeling reinforces the habit.

Can You Listen to Audiobooks Faster and Still Retain It?

Rule 8: Speed up your listening — and your reading. There is no rule that says you must listen to audiobooks at 1x speed. Start at 1.5x. Once that feels comfortable, try 1.75x or 2x. Your brain adapts faster than you'd think, and within a few weeks you'll find that normal speed actually feels slow.

Listening at 2x speed doesn't halve your comprehension — studies and personal experience both suggest that, once trained, you retain just as much at faster speeds. What it does do is let you get through twice as many books in the same amount of time. It also helps with slower narrators or slower middle sections of otherwise great books.

The same principle applies to reading. Sub-vocalising every word (hearing the words in your head as you read) is one of the slowest reading habits there is. Training yourself to reduce sub-vocalisation can meaningfully increase your reading speed — especially helpful when you're pushing through a slower passage.

How to Make Buying Books a No-Brainer Habit

Rule 9: The impulse buy rule. When someone recommends a book — in a podcast, in a conversation, in a tweet — buy it immediately. Don't think about it. Don't add it to a list to revisit later. Just open your phone and get it.

The return on investment on books is extraordinary. A single idea from a £10 book can change how you think, work, or live. Books you bought on impulse and forgot about have a habit of turning up at exactly the right moment. Remove the friction at the point of acquisition and your to-read pile will quietly become one of your most valuable assets.

The Identity Shift That Changes Everything

Rule 10: Become a reader, not someone trying to read more. This is the deepest rule and the one that ties everything else together. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, identity drives behaviour. If you tell yourself "I'm not really a reader," your actions will follow that story.

Flip the script. Tell yourself — and mean it — "I am a reader." Readers always have a book on the go. Readers reach for their Kindle in moments of downtime. Readers get excited when someone recommends a great title. When you inhabit that identity, every one of these rules becomes easier to follow because they're just things that readers do.

The goal was never really to read more books. It's to become the kind of person who reads — and to get all the inspiration, education, and entertainment that comes with it. These 10 rules are just the path to get you there.