How I Read 40+ Books a Year While Working Full-Time (With Twins)
Reading 40+ books per year sounds impossible when you're parenting twins and working 10+ hours daily. It's not — it requires shifting from 'finding time to read' to 'integrating reading into existing time.' Here's the system that makes it work.
I read 40+ books in the last 12 months. Not speed-reading. Not reading summaries. Forty actual books — a mix of non-fiction (productivity, business, technology, psychology) and fiction (because a diet of exclusively non-fiction makes you insufferable at dinner parties). Here's how: audiobooks fill dead time, a Kindle fills waiting time, and a "reading before sleep" ritual fills the gap between exhaustion and unconsciousness.
The Three Formats Strategy
Audiobooks (60% of reading): Every commute, every grocery run, every household chore becomes reading time. Audible or Libby (free library audiobooks) at 1.3x speed (fast enough to save time, slow enough to comprehend non-fiction). At 1.3x speed, a 10-hour audiobook completes in 7.7 hours — spread across commutes and chores, that's roughly one book every 1-2 weeks from audio alone.
Audiobook selection matters: choose books where the narrative structure works audibly. Non-fiction with clear frameworks, memoirs, and popular science translate well to audio. Technical books with code examples, data tables, or reference material don't — save those for visual reading.
Kindle (30% of reading): The Kindle lives in my back pocket. Waiting rooms, queues, the 10 minutes before a meeting starts, the twins' naptime — these fragments add up to 20-30 minutes daily. The Kindle's instant-on and bookmarkless design means zero friction: pull it out, read for 3 minutes, put it away. Three minutes happens surprisingly often when you're looking for it.
Physical books (10% of reading): Reserved for books that benefit from physical interaction — books with visual elements, books I want to annotate heavily, and fiction that I want to experience as a physical artifact. Physical books live on the nightstand for the 15-20 minutes of reading before sleep.
The Selection Filter: What to Read
Reading 40 books is only valuable if they're the right 40 books. My selection filter: recommendations from trusted sources (specific people whose taste I've validated over years), books referenced in multiple sources (if three different articles or podcasts mention the same book, it's probably significant), and books relevant to current projects or problems (reading about textile science while building Kimaya Threads, reading about SaaS metrics while growing ServiceCrud).
The quit rule: if a book hasn't engaged me by page 50, I stop. Life is too short for books you're enduring rather than enjoying. This rule prevents the "sunk cost" trap of finishing a bad book just because you started it. Quitting bad books faster means finishing more good books.
Retention: Reading vs. Remembering
Reading without retention is entertainment, not education. My retention system: Highlights: Kindle highlights and Audible bookmarks capture passages that resonate. These sync to Readwise, which resurfaces random highlights daily — creating spaced repetition of ideas without additional effort. Book notes: After finishing a non-fiction book, I write a 300-500 word summary in Obsidian: key ideas, personal takeaways, and how it applies to my current projects. This synthesis forces active processing that passive reading doesn't provide. Application: The ultimate retention mechanism — using a book's ideas in real work. A concept from "Atomic Habits" applied to my coding practice, a framework from "The Lean Startup" applied to product validation. Application transforms abstract knowledge into embedded skill.
The Reading-Internet Trade
The honest answer to "where do you find time to read?" is: I traded internet browsing for reading. The average adult spends 2-4 hours daily on social media, news, and aimless browsing. I redirected 45-60 minutes of that to reading. No heroic time management — just a conscious substitution of a higher-value activity for a lower-value one. When the impulse to check Twitter strikes, I open the Kindle app instead. Same dopamine hit of new information, vastly higher quality of input.
Forty books a year isn't about discipline or time management. It's about format strategy (audio fills dead time), device strategy (Kindle fills fragments), and content strategy (quit bad books, retain good ones). The system is simple. The compound effect of 40 books of curated knowledge per year — ideas, frameworks, perspectives, vocabulary — is transformative.