Read a Book a Week by Filling Every Idle Moment Instead of Your Phone

A prolific reader lays out how he went from fewer than ten books a year to roughly one a week, and the core move isn’t finding dedicated reading time — it’s replacing reflexive phone use with reading. He deleted social media and streaming apps from his iPhone, wore a cheap analog watch so he’d stop reaching for the device to check the time, and let his brain adjust to the initial discomfort of unfilled minutes. He then carries a book everywhere (meals, transit, waiting on errands, even walking the dog), so any dead moment becomes reading time.

On tooling and selection, he recommends an e-reader for portability and features like backlighting and instant definitions, but alternates with cheaper, easier-to-carry paperbacks to avoid the sameness of an all-digital diet. He reads several books in parallel, mixes fiction and non-fiction, and reads broadly across genres. Two habits stand out: quitting books freely — an unfinished book isn’t a failure, and some books (he cites Hesse’s Siddhartha) only land once you’re ready — and building a physical library, largely from used bookshops and markets.

To sustain the habit, he leans on goal-setting and progress tracking (Goodreads’ Reading Challenge), while warning against treating the count as the point. Writing reviews cements what you’ve read and sharpens comprehension, and he sources his next reads from Goodreads comments and spoiler-free YouTube reviewers. The through-line is a form of digital minimalism: strip away the attention-capturing apps, and reading rushes in to fill the vacuum.