Book Over Phone

How to read more without finding more time

I’ve been trying to figure out how to find the time to re-read The Odyssey before watching Christopher Nolan’s new film about it next month. A reasonable estimate is roughly 15 hours of careful reading. At 30 minutes a day, that’s a month. The film comes out 17th July, so I’d better get cracking.

The obvious fix: block out 30 minutes a day – say, in the evening. But in our era of ‘time famine’, most of us don’t feel we can spare 30 minutes a day, so this would come at the sacrifice of something else. The things people often cut back to free up time are high value activities: sleep less, exercise less, socialise less. None are desirable.

A much more desirable approach is to replace wasted time with useful time. Rather than finding more time, this involves using the time we already have more intentionally.

Three of the most common sources of wasted time today are needlessly checking digital communication, spending too long in meetings, and – worst of all – scrolling. Across these three sources alone there’s an abundance of wasted time we could convert into useful time. The average person spends over four and a half hours a day on their phone. So it really shouldn’t be hard to find 30 minutes a day for additional reading, without this coming at the cost of scaling back on high value activities.

Here’s a simple strategy for converting wasted time into time you can spend reading. I call it book over phone.

It goes like this:

1. When you work, put your phone in a different room. Research shows this improves our cognitive performance.

2. Put the book you’re reading on top of your phone. Now, the next time you’re tempted to pick up your phone, the first thing you’ll encounter won’t be your phone – it’ll be the book.

3. Whenever you’re tempted to pick up your phone, read a page of the book instead.

If you only have time to read a paragraph, that’s fine. Whatever the amount, we’ve turned a moment of distraction into a moment of reading.

If you want to go deeper, also listen to the audiobook while commuting. I’ve found I retain more from books by doing this. Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry have both narrated audiobooks of The Odyssey (albeit different versions – McKellen’s is of a translation, Fry’s is of his re-telling of the myth). That’s an impossible choice. I spend a lot of time cycling and taking the subway, so… I might just listen to both.

You could apply a similar principle to other activities you want to do:

• Want to learn the piano? Hide your phone under your piano. Piano over phone.

• Want to learn a language? Put your flashcards on top of your phone. Language over phone.

• Want to meditate more? Put your meditation cushion on top of your phone. Meditation over phone.

The key is to make your desired activity easier to start than the distraction.

We rarely need to sacrifice sleep, exercise, or time with the people we love to spend more time on simple passions like reading. We just need to replace something stealing our time with something worth investing it in.

The next time you find yourself thinking, “I’d love to do that, but I don’t have the time”, ask yourself: where can I turn wasted time into useful time?

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Invitation to a free online masterclass on this topic:

‘The Five Hours You Didn’t Know You Had’

📅 Tuesday 9th June

⏰ 12-1pm ET

This free masterclass will be built around a single diagnostic practice: our new ‘Values-Time Audit’. We’ll look at where your time is going across your calendar, your screen time, and the hours that never show up on either, and we’ll compare that against your priorities. The gap between those two pictures is where your five hours are hiding.

Click here to learn more. Hope to see you there!

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drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale