When I was a kid, I read voraciously. The only time I didn’t have a book in my hand was when my mom made me put it down to come to the dinner table. (But breakfast and lunch—fair game for eating over a book.) I’ve been blessed with a constitution that was never prone to carsickness, so books came along on even the shortest drives to the grocery store or to church. I played hooky from Sunday School, with its ancient, gray-haired teachers and their flannelgraph illustrations, to hang out in the church library. I read probably 100+ books a year, purchased from the local bookstore (when I got in trouble, the worst punishment my mother could administer was to hand me my allowance but refuse to drive me to the bookstore), or borrowed from the library. I’ve lived in the same town for twenty-five years and in that time the library has rearranged its shelves twice (and is currently in the midst of a major renovation). Attached to the memories of the books I’ve read over the decades is a picture of what the library looked like in that moment, and in which corner of the building I browsed those particular shelves.
As I entered my teens and more of my time was taken by work and friends and the freedom of a driver’s license, I compensated by spending my Friday nights reading until 2 or 3am, sleeping in til noon the next day. I got a job as a barista in a tiny parking-lot coffee hut; being a one-girl show during my shift not only made my introverted heart happy, but it also meant I could read between customers. Even when I got married, little changed. My husband worked nights, so I’d wait up for him, my books keeping me company until he got home at midnight—even later if he was on graveyard shift and the book was really good. During the first year of our marriage, I went through a Nicholas Sparks stage and cried over The Notebook long before it became a movie. Perk of reading alone late at night: it’s your book party and you can cry if you want to. I vividly remember lying in bed at 1:30 in the morning, bawling my eyes out through the final chapters of Mockingjay.
I read entire series while nursing babies (thank you, Boppy, for making it possible to breastfeed while keeping one hand free to hold a book). Board books and picture books were added to the library haul. By this point, I was seriously pursuing my long-held dream of writing my own books, and had shifted my focus to writing children’s novels after reading The Tale of Desperaux and realizing just how much beauty and depth could be contained in a middle grade novel. I read more of the kinds of stories I hoped to write, every book equal parts inspiring and oh-my-gosh-I’ll-never-be-this-good. Books were the things that fueled both my passion and my energy. Writing them felt magical, like I was doing the thing I was born to do. Reading them filled my cup, as both as author and a human being, expanding my knowledge of the craft and—as they had since I was a child—giving me a new understanding of and empathy for the world around me.
I was fortunate to have the choice to stay home with my kids, and even as I started to homeschool them, I still found time for reading and writing. I read Brian Selznak’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, The Milk, each in one sitting while my two toddlers took their afternoon nap. My husband still worked rotating shifts, which meant the hours after tucking the kids into bed were mine to do with as my night-owl self wished. I penned my first two novels between 9pm and midnight. Social media was really becoming a thing, and I signed up for Instagram and Twitter, and in the latter found a thriving community of like-minded writers. I started spending more time online, talking with other writers, composing 140-character pitches for my stories and posting them on hashtags during Twitter pitch events, checking my notifications every ten minutes in the hopes that a literary agent would have liked one of my tweets and requested to see my manuscript.
And then, it happened. I got accepted into a writing contest, and a few months later, I signed with my agent. Suddenly, I felt the self-imposed pressure to concentrate every spare moment on my writing career. I needed to write the next book, build a social media platform, contribute to the writing community. All while being a wife and mom and homeschooling my kids.
Around the same time, my husband changed jobs, now working 9-5, no more nights or rotating shifts. Incredible for our family and quality of life, not so incredible for my established routine of reading and writing late into the night. I managed to write a little most afternoons after homeschool lessons were done, but that, too, ended when I took a full time job working from home. So I played catch-up in the evenings, scribbling notes between making dinner and ballet and soccer practice. Even after we transitioned our kids to public school, it didn’t mean I had more time, it just meant I had to do less multitasking. By the end of the day, my brain still felt like mush, and all I wanted to do was flop onto the couch, scroll through Instagram and watch Netflix with my husband.
And so, I read less while my list of books I should be reading—and my guilt over not reading them—grew. You can’t be a good writer if you don’t read, and all my author friends were so well versed in current releases, talking about books and authors I’d never even heard of, much less read. At some point, reading became a chore, an obligation. I was part of two book clubs and was lucky to manage the chapter a week and book a month they required. Most of the books in the “read” section of my Goodreads profile were the ones my son picked for our bedtime reading sessions. I would optimistically grab books that caught my eye from the library shelves, but more often than not, they’d be due long before I had the chance to finish them. I’d written three books in four years but despite the wonderful and exhaustive efforts of my amazing agent, none of them had sold. I was cranky. All the time. I felt like I’d lost so much joy in the things I’d once loved, the things that had refreshed me and fueled my creative energy, my calling: books. But I didn’t know how to get it back. I just didn’t have the time.
Or so I thought.
The truth would come, appropriately enough, in the form of a book.
My husband was reading John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and one evening he read me this staggering statistic:
“The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year...in just 417 hours.
Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day.
But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours.
TV...2,737.5 hours.”
Comer goes on to say in a footnote to this passage that if the average person spent their annual 3,442.5 hours of social media + TV on reading instead, they’d read more than 1600 books per year.
My reaction: holy bleep.
By this point, I knew something needed to give in my own life, that I needed to slow down, reset. This was the nudge I needed. My husband had already planned a social media break for January, and I decided to join him. I have screen time reports on my phone, and I knew at that point I averaged 3.5-4 hours per day on my phone, but if you’d asked me, I would have told you the vast majority of that time was work related. I didn’t feel like I spent mindless hours scrolling the internet, but I decided to go a few steps further than staying off social media for a month, just to see what would happen.
On January 1st, I initiated the following rules:
- No more than an hour a day on my phone.
- No Twitter, no Instagram, no surfing the web. (I lost all love for Facebook a long time ago, so saying no to logging in there wasn’t much of a sacrifice.)
- My phone would stay on my desk and not follow me around the house.
- Screen time limits on my phone would lock me out of the majority of apps, allowing only notifications of calls and texts, from 8pm until 9am when my work day began.
- All work-related tasks would be done on my computer or iPad.
- Evenings had to involve at least some quiet reading time, no just binge-watching TV (which my husband also agreed to).
I also made a stack of books on a side table in our bedroom—a physical tower of all the books that had been sitting unread on my bookshelves, some of them for years, that I most wanted to read.
Thus began my experimental attempt to recapture the joy of reading.
It took only 6 days and 2 finished books for me to realize my problem had never been about a lack of time, but a lack of intentionality over how I’d come to spend my time. It turned out I was a lot more addicted to my phone than I’d thought. Without even realizing the extent, I’d fallen into a mindless habit of turning to my phone or the TV whenever I was tired, anxious, bored, or just had a spare five minutes. Once I broke this cycle, I suddenly had access to more hours in my day. Armed with my new-found freedom, I returned to the glory days of my youth. Instead of pulling out my phone in the dentist waiting room, I brought a book. Instead of tapping through Instagram at lunch, I read. Instead of squeezing in work emails while I waited for my kids in the school pick-up line, I finished another chapter.
The thing I found most surprising after a week or two, was that books weren’t the only media I consumed or activity I found time to enjoy. I still wrote (hitting 15k on a new project), watched TV, listened to podcasts, went to the movies, took walks, played games with my kids, went on a date with my husband—sometimes all in one day, with time to spare. Suddenly, I’d managed to do all the stuff I wished I had more time for, without feeling frazzled or guilty or exhausted. It felt like I'd taken a deep breath for the first time in ages and it felt amazing. But what had me bubbling over with an almost giddy excitement was the books.
Leaving the library with a whole stack, filled with favorite characters I’d lost touch with, random choices that had jumped out at me from the shelves, and some that I’d been wanting to read for ages (if only I had time), I felt like a new person that looked an awful lot like the old me. It was like seeing my reflection in a mirror and realizing, oh, there you are.
Now, eight weeks and seventeen books into this year, I've realized that I tend to treat my time like I treat my money. When things get tight, I let go of the wants I deem less important than my needs, prioritizing what should stay and what has to go. So, I look at my full calendar and decide what gets set aside, oftentimes those things I love, that bring me joy, but that seem less important in light of my job, my spouse, our kids, and various "obligations." But unlike money, which is a very real and substantial thing and often requires sacrifice for at least a season to survive the now or to set ourselves up for future success, my lack of time was really an illusion. Especially as someone privileged enough to only have to work 40 hours a week to help care for my family. The time was there all along, I’d just spent it on a device that offered a distraction from my stress, anxiety, busyness, and boredom—emotions which, it turns out, were better treated by picking up a book.
Despite the fact that cutting out social media for a month is what led to this discovery, I haven't become anti-social-media or anti-technology at all. I needed that break, and I'd encourage anyone to do the same, but I'm not going to advise smashing your phone or deleting all your accounts. On February 1st, I logged back into Instagram, just with a 15-minute daily limit. I still have that 8pm-9am downtime scheduled, and even extended it to all day Saturday, but sometimes my job requires accessing my work alerts on my phone and that's okay. I have genuine friendships that are based online, with people I’ve never met in person, and I think it’s great that we can make those kinds of connections with people we wouldn’t otherwise have in our community. When I hit publish on this post, I’ll share it on my online platforms, hopeful that someone will see it in their feed, read it, and maybe get something out of it. That’s the whole point of telling stories, after all. The hope that someone will read it and be impacted by it, whether inspired or simply amused, transported away from the heaviness of the world for a bit. It’s why I write books and why I read them—with a renewed sense of joy, thanks to some new and healthier rhythms.
That has been the most surprising thing about this whole experiment. Rediscovering something I love hasn't required giving up something else of "lesser" value or importance. It hasn't required “hustle” or getting up at 5am in order to squeeze more hours out of my day. It hasn't required finding time at all, just making time. As someone who is guilty of saying, "If only I had the time," it turns out I had more than I thought. Chances are, you do too. And if there’s a thing that you love, that you lost along the way, it’s worth the effort to find your way back. To make time. To put down your phone for a bit, look in the mirror and say, oh, there you are. And if, like me, you see a familiar bookworm staring back, maybe I’ll see you at the library.
