Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like much. On any single morning, it isn’t. Over a month, it adds up to more reading than a lot of people do in a year.
The math
Adults read silently at roughly 238 words a minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction, according to a 2019 review of reading-speed studies.1 Take the slower number. Twenty minutes is about 4,800 words. Every day for a month, that’s around 143,000 words.
A typical novel runs somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words. So twenty minutes a day comes to roughly one and a half to two books a month, or eighteen to twenty-four a year. No reading marathons required.
Ten minutes is half that, and it still comes to about a book a month.
Pick a number you’ll actually hit
The best goal is one you’d still meet on a bad day. Start smaller than you think you should. You can raise it whenever you like, even halfway through a morning. Once the minutes start counting, the app only stops you from lowering it.
The smallest goal is five minutes. That’s a fine place to start.
Make the first minute easy
- Leave the book open where you stopped, in an app that counts.
- Pick tomorrow’s reading tonight.
- Count more than books. A Bible app, a language lesson or a journal can count too. iOS tracks time in whichever apps you choose.
Twenty minutes won’t feel like much on any given morning. That’s the point.
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. ↩