Why is reading so much harder to make time for than writing?

frames, myths, and priorities...

I want to read. I want to read everything. Ok, maybe not everything… But I want to read sooo many poets, and I want to read sooo many science fiction novels! And I know - particularly for the reading poets part - that reading is crucial for my creative development and appreciation/understanding of the wider poetry scene (and it’s fun!). So I want to read basically everything I can get my greedy hands on.

And yet, I consistently find spending time reading the most difficult thing to do. Not because reading itself is difficult, quite the opposite: reading is joyful. But I do so little of it. Why? And how do I prioritise it?

I think there are two things at play here.

I’m busy. My ‘day job’ is largely evening and weekend work with some day shifts here and there, and the time around it gets eaten up by gym (I have to maintain a level of fitness to do parts of my job), climbing (honestly one of the biggest ways I keep mentally well and regulated), and then writing (poetry, MfA, Substack, & all the admin for events, workshops etc). Add in a partnership I’m conscious of earmarking quality time for, a birdwatching hobby, and seeing a couple friends here and there, and there’s not a huge bunch of space left for the kind of downtime where I’m just floating around and could spontaneously think: oh, I’ll pick up a book for the next couple hours.

So as the space and time doesn’t necessarily naturally arise on its own I need to be more intentional with reading. And I do intend to read, it’s there in my mind that I want to make time for it, I want to do it.

And then I’ll manage it. I’ll pick up, say, a pamphlet someone’s recommended, and really enjoy it (or maybe enjoy it not so much because it’s also fine not to like everything we read). I’ll finish it, put it down, go on with my life, and suddenly it’s three weeks later and I haven’t read anything else except a few poems doing the rounds on Instagram (facepalm).

This is frustrating. And the first thing going on is that reading is labelled in my mind as a ‘leisure activity’ rather than something I do as part of ‘work’. So there’s a little internal reframing to work on because I also don’t prioritise leisure activities so what tends to happen is I hit a point where I have to stop doing things and then either escape out into nature and birding or disappear into a comforting sci-fi series (either way reading doesn’t get much of a look in).

The second thing going on is the lovely myth of productivity we’re all de facto enrolled in as punishment for existing in western culture at this time. I want so much to untangle myself from this myth, particularly since discovering my neurodivergence and becoming more aware of how tying myself to productivity essentially hurts my wellness. But it’s pernicious, and over the course of my life I’ve sewn it into my bones, into every cell of my being.

Reading, while there’s clear outcomes from it that I definitely want i.e. more time reading poems, discovering more poets I love, benefitting my practice etc etc, isn’t productive. At the end of a reading session I don’t have a draft of a new poem, a Substack post to publish, an event ready to advertise; I haven’t produced anything tangible.

And even though I know, logically, that producing something all the time isn’t what I should be focusing on (or hanging my self-worth on), when I’m faced with a little block of writing time (poetry, MfA, Substack etc) I’m feeling the pressure to keep all those things moving by producing something I can see or touch or send out into the world; working wins out over reading every time. Reading is always relegated to ‘later’ even though I know it’s endlessly informative, and will bring me both joy and learning.

To try combat this, in the context of working on the MA dissertation part of my MfA and at the suggestion of my supervisor, two months ago I made a reading tracker. I now have a pretty piece of paper with lots of boxes in for each month, and every time I spend an hour reading something for my diss I can colour in a box and feel a little spark of (dopamine) achievement (free hack for all my ND friends reading this).

What has this revealed? That my reading habits are actually exactly as bad as I feared.

I want to change this in myself; I want to reframe reading as a crucial, important, valuable practice that I make time for rather than hope time appears for.

How do I do this? I’m not sure. But I believe we can’t change the things we aren’t looking at, and by spending more time with this I’m bringing it further into my awareness, slowly cultivating that change.

And the tracker has helped a little: I do want to colour in those boxes, and enjoy it when I do, and it’s given me some concrete evidence to help motivate my change.

I’m also opening the conversation out, because I’d love to know if you experience, or have experienced, something similar, and what you’ve done about it if you have. Or even if you just don’t relate to this at all! Drop your thoughts in the comments.

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Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash