I treat my phone like poison. I leave the house as much as possible without it.
I don’t listen to audiobooks just because I can’t have things in my ears all the time because then I don’t have an internal monologue, which is really scary.
I get a little reading done on my commute, but unfortunately my commute is really short. I wish that my commute was like five subway stops longer, although that would mean that I worked in midtown.
On planes, I get a lot of reading done, probably because you don’t have the internet.
Book people are going to be incensed by this, but I often listen while I am playing speed chess. I also often listen somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5x.
I don’t think it’s hard to find time to do anything.
But in my household, my husband reads every night before he goes to bed and I’m not allowed to use my phone in bed when he’s doing that so I get cowed into joining him. His rituals are stronger and healthier than mine and I just fall into line. I do about half of what he does, half the exercise, half the reading. And that’s good enough for me.
My concern is making sure that I’m always reading something that isn’t reading for work. Partially because that’s just important to do to stay alive, and partially because a lot of the books that I read for work are pretty bad.
I keep a private list of all the books that I’ve read, but I try not to get into the mindset of wanting to maximize the number because I feel like if you do that then you tend to opt for reading shorter novels over longer ones. You want to feel open to reading Proust. I mostly keep a list because people ask me for book recommendations or I’m writing a piece where I’m trying to think of every book that has a woman who killed her husband. That’s just an example.
I have emotional responses to books on planes and I do like the fact that I don’t have internet access.
People think you need to carve out multiple uninterrupted hours of reading time. But if I’m watching a Notre Dame football game on TV, I’ll leave the family room during halftime and read during those 20 minutes. If I’m taking my youngest to his baseball practice, I’ll go back to my car and read. If I’m ten minutes early to pick someone up, I’ll read. Most mornings I work out or go for a swim and when I’m done, I sit out in the park in front of the YMCA and read for ten minutes. Stealing time is kind of how I think of it.