💬 20 minutes a day finally got me reading again

I used to buy a book every month and finish 1 of every 4. They sat on the shelf looking guilty. Every January I'd promise myself an hour a day. By the second week it was down to nothing. Last year my sister laughed and said, just do 20 minutes. I thought that was too small to count. So I tried it anyway, mostly to prove her wrong. That was 14 months ago and I'm still doing it. I read after Isha, on the bed, with the phone in the other room. That last part matters a lot. If the phone is next to me, 20 minutes turns into 3 pages and then I'm watching cricket clips. Some nights I read 40 minutes because the book is good. Some nights it's 10 and I'm half asleep. Both count. That was the rule I made, and it's why I haven't quit like all the other times. I've finished 17 books since then. Not impressive for some people, but it's more than the 6 years before. Mostly boring stuff, history, a few biographies, one thick novel that took me 5 weeks. I liked that one. At work I don't feel smarter or anything. People still send me the same emails and I still reply late. But I'm calmer on the bus ride home. I don't reach for my phone as quickly. Small thing, I know. The only trouble is picking the next book. I wasted 3 weeks on one that everyone had praised. I almost quit reading over it. Then my sister handed me something short and told me to just start. It was 150 pages and I finished it in 4 nights. That got me going again. Short books are underrated. If anyone has a short book that really worked for them, I'm taking suggestions. Fiction or not, I don't mind.

Thin books are my cheat code too. My mother gave me a 120 page one last year.

20 minutes works for me too, though I can't do the phone in another room thing. I tried it for a week and kept walking in to check it. Total waste of time. What helped me was reading in the morning before anyone else wakes up, around 5:30, with tea. Short books are the real trick for me as well. A thick one scares me off in 2 days.