Reading more is rarely a problem of willingness. It is a problem of logistics. A working week full of trains, meetings, laundry and the weekly shop does not leave a tidy three-hour block for a novel, and waiting for one is how a bookshelf ends up decorative.

The fix is not to find more time. It is to use the pockets of time you already have. Most UK commuters lose a decent stretch every week to platforms, bus seats and waiting rooms without noticing it going. Here is how to turn that into pages, without pretending you will start waking at five.

Start by measuring the week you already have

Before you buy anything or download anything, spend a few days noticing where the gaps are. Not the ideal gaps you would like to have, the real ones.

• Standing on a platform, or waiting for a bus that is running late.
• The middle chunk of a train journey once you have a seat.
• Queueing for a coffee, or waiting for a kettle to boil.
• Twenty minutes at lunch when you would otherwise scroll.
• The last fifteen minutes before sleep.

None of these is long enough for a serious reading session. All of them together are. The trick is to have something to read already loaded, charged, downloaded or in your coat pocket, so the moment arrives and you do not spend it deciding what to read.

Audiobooks solve the standing-up problem

If you commute on a packed Northern line train at 8am, a paperback is not happening. You are holding a rail with one hand and a bag with the other. Audio is the only format that works in that position, which makes it the single most useful tool for a busy reader.

A few things make the difference between finishing books this way and drifting off after two chapters:

• Download before you leave the house. Signal on the move is unreliable, and fiddling with an app while boarding is how you lose the thread.
• Pick the narrator as carefully as the book. A voice you find grating will kill a good novel. Listen to the sample first.
• Be honest about speed. Slightly faster than normal suits some listeners, but there is a point where you are hearing words rather than following a story. If you cannot remember last week's chapters, slow down.
• Non-fiction and memoir often work better aloud than dense literary fiction, where the rhythm on the page is doing a lot of the work.

Many people read more in a month once they accept this split: audio for walking, standing and washing up; paper or an e-reader for sitting down. Some apps will even sync your place between the audiobook and the ebook, so a train journey at night picks up where the morning's walk left off.

Shorter books are not lesser books

A great deal of the frustration around reading comes from starting the wrong shape of book. A 700-page doorstop is a wonderful thing, but it is a poor choice for someone whose week is already full.

Try building some of your reading year around shorter forms: novellas, essay collections, short story anthologies, poetry, slim translated novels. Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader are all books you could finish in a fortnight of commuting. So is a short story collection read one story at a time, which suits a bus ride neatly: begin and end inside the journey.

Poetry deserves a mention too. Two poems on a Tuesday morning is genuine reading, and it builds a habit that survives a hectic week.

Attach reading to something you already do

Willpower is unreliable; routine is not. If reading has to compete with everything else on your phone, it will lose. So attach it to an existing trigger.

Book on the passenger seat, so a traffic jam becomes a chapter. Audiobook started the moment you walk out of the front door, before the podcast reflex kicks in. A paperback in the drawer at work for lunchtime. Two pages before lights out, which usually becomes five.

The two-page rule is worth taking seriously. Committing to a tiny amount removes the negotiation. On the nights you are too tired, you keep the streak alive; on the nights you are not, you keep reading. Phones out of reach help, and so does a lamp you actually like switching on.

Be ruthless about the book in your hand

Nothing slows reading down like a book you are only reading out of obligation. If you are 50 pages in and dreading the commute because of it, put it down. You can return to it in a year, or never. Either is fine.

Keep a small stack of likely next reads ready, ideally a mix: one absorbing novel, one short option, one non-fiction title you can dip into. When you finish something, you pick up the next book the same evening rather than spending a week choosing.

Keep the supply cheap and steady

Reading more should not mean spending more. Your local library card is the obvious starting point, and most UK library services now lend ebooks and audiobooks through apps you can use on a phone, often with no trip required. Charity shops and second-hand bookshops make the experimental reading that keeps a habit interesting very affordable, and they are good places to find the short, older titles that suit a commute.

One practical note: if you are buying audio or ebook subscriptions, check what you already pay for before adding another monthly charge, and cancel anything you have not opened in a month.

A realistic week

Here is what this looks like in practice, without anything heroic in it.

1. Sunday evening: choose the next book, download the audio, drop the paperback into your bag. Two minutes.
2. Monday commute: audio on for the walk and the standing section. Aim for one chapter, no more.
3. Lunchtimes: fifteen minutes with the book instead of a screen. It adds up to more than an hour across the week.
4. Evenings: two pages before sleep. Some nights that is all you get, and that is fine.
5. Saturday: one longer sitting, forty minutes, with the phone in another room.
6. Sunday: finish it or abandon it, then repeat.

Done consistently, that is a book a fortnight for most people, sometimes more. The point is not the number. It is that there is always a book in progress, and that the dead time in your week has somewhere to go.

Photo: Vincent M.A. Janssen / Pexels