One of the most common excuses for not reading is being too “busy”. While I believe that is true, there is one rule I have that allows me to read enough to hit my yearly reading goals. This has helped me in nursing school, while working full time, and now, with a newborn.
What a Busy Day Looks Like
While this isn’t a lifestyle blog, let me lightly describe what my busy day looks like. This does include a lot of the daily routine with the baby, and my day-off routines when I was working full time. This is a busy day that is not as common as others, but helpful to see how I have little time to read:
My husband is in the office and I am on my own to handle my 3 week old baby. He leaves by 6:30am and will leave work to go to the gym later and return home closer to 5pm.
Baby and I wake up at 7am, where I get ready, wake and feed the little one, change a diaper or three, then pump. I will then make breakfast for myself and eat until about 9am. After that, I spend some time with my little one in her wake window, where she is awake until about 11am before falling back asleep.
I will wear her and take her with me to manage bottle dishes, normal dishes, and cleaning until 1pm. Somewhere between 1-3pm I will wake the little and do my 9am routine once again and will do this every 3 hours. The surrounding time, I take to each lunch. Afterwards, it is time to get moving again, where I will care for animals, have another long wake window, and wake my little closer to 5pm.
When my husband is home, dinner is started (by him thankfully). Then it is dinner time until 6:30. This is the start of winding down the little and taking her to the bath, music, reading (baby books), noise machine, and rocking to sleep. This takes 1-5 hours depending on “witching hour” and her feeding needs. By the time we are in bed, it is usually close to 11pm to shut down the whole house and get ourselves ready for bed.
The Time to Read
Notice here I am constantly moving and having little time to read. Now, someone may tell you to read on the lunch breaks, however with a newborn, lunch breaks are usually occupying both hands: one eating, and one holding the baby if they won’t go down in a sleep space.
The real time to read is right before bed. While the day sucks to “crunch in chapters”, especially while reading an epic like Stormlight, some of those chapters can take over an hour to finish. Building a routine during your sleep regimen is not only beneficial to your reading goals, but to your health as well.
Right before bed has studies proving to be a good form of sleep hygiene. It takes you away from a screen like your phone, and can make you very tired. More than likely, I am already extremely tired, but this is an opportunity when the baby is down, close by, and unwinding just like you are. Even when I didn’t have a newborn, I worked 12 hours in the hospital and still came home to read and I found I was getting better sleep because I was removing the fight or flight out of my day.
How Long Do I Read
This is where it gets tricky because of books you read, how long chapters are, and how tired you are. Even while I was working I would sometimes sleep so poorly that I could blink through a chapter and go to bed, or fall asleep a few pages in. With a newborn, I am only running between 1-5 hours of sleep a night. Sometimes, I just read a page or two then go to bed.
What I really like to do is to set a goal of how many chapters I read before bed depending on how tired I feel. Sometimes it’s one, others it’s five or six and I can surpass that.
This is a personal goal, but it allows me to read every single night, which is better than trying to knock out a long day of reading in a two week time span when I find time.
This eliminates the work of “finding time” and implementing it into a normal routine that should work for almost everyone, even if you’re tired.
The Results
I implemented this before my baby was born when I was working full time, and I managed to finish almost 6 books (Including Words of Radiance, a 1100 page book) in December.
This is because I took out the reliance of finding time in a day every 2 weeks, and breaking it up over time at night every day. If I spend 3 hours a day reading a book in one week, versus reading for 10-30 minutes every night before bed, I am spending the same amount of time reading but I split it up to hit my goals with less stress of “finding time”.
I am also sleeping better and going to sleep quicker than I would have if I was on tiktok or doing something online (like writing blog posts).
Give this a try and see how it works! Let me know and happy reading!
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