Time is almost never the real obstacle

People who say they have no time to read usually have the time and not the entry point.

Most people who miss reading are not short of minutes. They are short of uninterrupted, unclaimed minutes with a clear beginning, which is a different problem. The evening hour exists, but it arrives already spoken for by a screen that starts instantly and asks nothing. Reading has a slightly higher activation cost: you have to find the thing, remember where you were, and let your attention settle for a few minutes before it becomes pleasant. That gap between starting and enjoying is where the habit usually dies. Nobody abandons reading because they hate it. They abandon it because starting is marginally harder than not starting, repeated across a few hundred evenings.

The fixes are unglamorous and they work. Leave the thing physically where you will be, open, face down, so that starting requires no decision. Make the first five minutes the only commitment; if it is going to work, five minutes will turn into thirty without your help. Put the phone in a different room rather than face down on the same table, because the same table is not far enough. And treat the fifteen minutes before sleep as reading time rather than the leftovers of the day. Fifteen minutes claimed in advance is worth an hour that never arrives.

It also helps to stop aiming at the wrong target. The goal is not to read for two hours, because you almost never have two hours and the standard just makes you feel behind. The goal is to have something going. A person who reads twelve minutes a day is a reader, comfortably and permanently, and will finish a surprising amount over a year without ever once feeling disciplined about it. Consistency at a low level beats intensity you cannot sustain, in this as in most things. Nobody has ever been disqualified from calling themselves a reader for going slowly.