Designing Your Daily Reading Ritual
Knowing the science is one thing; applying it is another. The real art of building a sustainable reading habit lies in the design of your daily ritual. We need to create a system that works with your brain’s natural tendencies, not against them. This involves making your desired habit obvious, easy, and satisfying. Let’s break down the four key design principles that will help you craft a ritual that you can stick with even on your busiest days.
Start Impossibly Small: Your Minimum Viable Action
The single biggest mistake people make when starting a new habit is making it too big. Enthusiasm is high at the beginning, so we commit to reading for 30 minutes a day. This works for a day or two, but then life gets in the way. A long day at work, family commitments, or simple fatigue makes 30 minutes feel like an insurmountable mountain. We skip one day, then another, and soon the habit is abandoned.
The solution is to start with a minimum viable action (MVA). This is the smallest possible version of your habit that you can do without fail, every single day, no matter how tired or unmotivated you are. It should feel almost laughably easy. For a daily reading habit, your MVA might be:
Read one sentence.
That’s it. Not a chapter, not a page, but one single sentence. Anyone can read one sentence. The purpose of the MVA is not to make progress in your book; it is to master the art of showing up. The goal for the first few weeks is to automate the action of picking up the book and opening it at your designated time. Once you’ve read your one sentence, you are free to stop. You’ve succeeded for the day. But what often happens is that the inertia is broken. Once the book is in your hands, you might just feel like reading a full paragraph, or a page, or even a chapter. The MVA gets you started, and momentum often takes care of the rest.
Make It Obvious: Engineering Your Environment
Our brains are lazy. They follow the path of least resistance and respond to the most obvious cues in our environment. If the first thing you see when you wake up is your phone, you will check it. If the first thing you see when you walk into the living room is the TV remote, you will be tempted to turn it on. To build a reading habit, we must make the cue for reading more obvious than the cues for our distractions.
This is where environment design comes in. Instead of relying on a reminder in your phone (which is already a source of distraction), use physical cues. If you want to read before bed, don’t leave your book on a dusty shelf. Place it directly on your pillow in the morning. When you go to get into bed at night, you literally have to touch the book to move it. The cue couldn’t be more obvious. If you want to read with your morning coffee, leave the book on top of your coffee machine or next to your favorite mug. The goal is to design a space where the desired choice is the most visible and accessible one.
Make It Easy: Conducting a Friction Audit
Friction is anything that stands between you and taking an action. It’s the effort, time, or number of steps required to do something. The more friction a habit has, the less likely you are to do it. A friction audit involves systematically identifying and removing these barriers for your desired habits, while simultaneously adding friction to your undesired habits.
To make your daily reading habit easier, reduce the friction. Ask yourself:
- Where is my book? If it’s in another room, that’s friction. Keep it within arm’s reach of where you plan to read.
- Is my e-reader charged? A dead battery is a major point of friction. Keep it plugged in.
- Do I have a bookmark? Searching for your page is friction. Use a bookmark every time.
Conversely, increase the friction for habits that compete with reading. If you tend to scroll on your phone in bed, make that harder. Move your phone charger to the kitchen or the living room. Forcing yourself to get out of your warm, comfortable bed to retrieve your phone adds a significant amount of friction, making it much less likely you’ll do it. By making reading easier and scrolling harder, you nudge your behavior in the right direction without needing a huge amount of willpower.
Make It Stick: The Art of Habit Stacking
One of the most effective ways to build a new habit is to anchor it to an existing one. This technique is called habit stacking. Your current daily routine is already filled with dozens of strong, automated habits: waking up, brushing your teeth, making coffee, getting dressed. These are stable anchors you can use to attach your new reading habit.
The formula is simple: After I [current habit], I will [new habit].
The key is to choose an anchor habit that happens at the time and location where you want your new reading habit to occur. Here are some powerful examples for creating robust book habits:
- After I brush my teeth at night, I will get into bed and read one page.
- After I pour my first cup of coffee in the morning, I will sit at the kitchen table and read for two minutes.
- After I finish cleaning up dinner, I will set a timer for five minutes and read on the couch.
Habit stacking is so effective because it leverages the momentum of an already-established behavior. You don’t have to remember to read; the completion of your anchor habit serves as the cue. It automates the trigger, making it much more likely that you’ll follow through with the action.
