Forty minutes each way is more than most people manage to read in a week. The time is already yours — it is unclaimed, repeating, and happens whether you want it to or not, which makes it the cheapest reading habit available. The reason it goes unused is almost never a lack of interest. It is that the decision gets made at the worst possible moment: standing on a platform, phone in hand, with nothing loaded and no plan.
The commute is won the night before. If the book is ready and the podcast is not, you will read. If neither is ready, you will scroll.
First, match the format to how you travel
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides everything.
Seated, with a stable ride — anything works. A paperback is genuinely pleasant here and has the advantage of being uninterruptible. Standing, one hand on a rail — a phone is the only realistic option, because a book needs two hands and a page turn needs three. Crowded, no hands free — audio, or nothing. Driving or cycling — audio only, and only if you can follow a story without taking attention off the road; if you cannot, this guide does not apply to you and that is fine.
Most people have a mixed commute: a seated stretch and a standing stretch. The fix is to have the same book available in two formats so a change of conditions does not end the session. Our notes on reading apps with text to speech cover the switch between reading and listening.
Set it up before you leave the house
Three minutes of preparation buys the whole trip. Open the book to where you stopped so the app or the bookmark is already in position. Download the chapters you will need — the one guaranteed feature of public transport is that the connection drops exactly when you want the next page. Put the book somewhere you reach without thinking: the outside pocket, not the bottom of the bag under the laptop.
If you commute with earphones, the same applies to audio: queue the chapter, not the app. "I will find something on the way" is how a reading habit becomes a scrolling habit.
Choose books that survive interruption
A commute is not a quiet room. You will be interrupted by stops, announcements, people, and the need to look up and check where you are. Some books tolerate that and some do not.
What works: short chapters, strong forward pull, clear scenes. Thrillers, essays, memoir, short stories, serialised fiction written in instalments. What tends not to work: dense nonfiction you need to annotate, anything with a large cast introduced quickly, poetry that needs stillness. Save those for home. Books you can read in one sitting and serialised fiction are both well suited to the format, because they were designed to be picked up and put down.
Deal with the phone honestly
If you read on your phone, you are reading on the same device that holds every notification you have. Willpower is not the answer here; configuration is. Silence notifications for the trip, keep the reading app on the home screen and the social apps a folder deep, and if the first tap of the journey is reliably the wrong one, delete the shortcut rather than negotiating with yourself twice a day. We go through this in detail in how to read on your phone without distractions.
Practical problems, practical fixes
Motion sickness. Common and not a character flaw. Audio solves it completely. If you want to read, sit facing forward, hold the text higher so your peripheral vision still catches the world moving, and take breaks at stops.
Standing with a bag. One-handed phone reading with the text large enough to read at arm's length. Set the font bigger than you would at home; you are reading in worse conditions.
A five-minute commute. Five minutes is still two or three pages, and two pages a day is a real habit — see how many pages you should read a day. Short does not mean pointless; it means pick something in small units.
You keep falling asleep. Then sleep. A commute nap is a legitimate use of a commute. Try the return leg instead, or the morning, when you are not spending down the day's attention.
Let the trip end the chapter
One small trick that makes commute reading stick: stop reading when the trip ends, even mid-sentence. Resisting the urge to finish the chapter at your desk keeps the book tied to the journey, and tomorrow you will get on with something to look forward to rather than something you half-closed.
We make Arwy, an Android reading app with offline downloads and text to speech, which is to say it was built for exactly this hour of the day — and it also connects you with other people reading the same book, so the thought you had on the bus has somewhere to go. If your commute reading is strictly a solitary ritual, that part is not for you, and the paperback in your coat pocket is doing the job perfectly well.
Read on the way in, and talk about it with someone who is on the same book. Get Arwy on Google Play.