Most busy leaders tell me the same thing: “I would love to read more, but I don’t have the time.” But it rests on a fallacy. Most executives imagine reading requires a magical moment—a quiet room, an empty to-do list, nothing pulling at them. For almost everyone, that moment never comes, except perhaps on a rare vacation, and even those are packed with activities.
This is not about savoring a novel word by word. It is about absorbing content—mostly nonfiction—at a pace that lets you finish roughly one book a week, however full your calendar is. It is not about time. It is about having a system. Here is mine.
Step 1: Are you a reader or a listener?
It starts with a single question, from Peter Drucker—the Austrian American regarded as the father of modern management. In his 1967 classic “The Effective Executive”, a landmark of twentieth-century management, he made a simple observation: Some people are readers, and some are listeners.
“It is a waste of time to talk to a reader,” he wrote. “He only listens after he has read.” And it is equally a waste to hand a listener a thick report—a listener grasps the world through the spoken word, not the written one. Most people have a dominant channel, and most have never asked which is theirs. Here is how to find out: When a colleague sends you a detailed report, do you grasp it only after reading it yourself, or faster when someone talks you through it? Do you retain more from documents, or from conversations and briefings?
Your honest answer reveals your type. The implications are enormous: Readers should ask for memos and read before meetings; listeners should ask for briefings and decide as they talk. Match your input to your wiring and you absorb more, faster. That same wiring decides how you read a book a week: If you are a reader, you read it; if you are a listener, you listen on audiobook. Choose the path that fits how your brain works.
Step 2: Find your sweet spot
Next, find the sweet spot in your week where this fits—it works even if you are exceptionally busy. Take my own schedule. I own and run a global strategy and management consulting firm. I give keynotes around the world. I also protect my mornings for creative work—writing books and composing music, something I have done since childhood, when I trained in music alongside business. I have a family I want to be present for and a global circle of friends I stay close to. And I am highly active: Sports five times a week, a good ninety minutes each. That calendar is full.
And yet the sweet spot is there. It is always there. I am a listener, so my question is simple: Where can I fit in regular listening? For me, it is my workouts—in the gym, while swimming with waterproof Bluetooth headphones, while stretching, doing yoga or cycling outdoors. Because I train five times a week, I don’t have one slot. I have five.
That is the beauty of listening: You do it while doing something else, which makes the slot easy to find. If you are a reader, the question is the same—where can I sit down with the book? Only you can answer that. But I promise: However busy your schedule is, there is always a sweet spot.
Step 3: Go faster than you think you can
That almost gets you there. The final piece is speed. If you are a listener, use this: On any audiobook service—Audible is excellent, but there are many—you can set the playback speed. Push it to a level genuinely too fast to follow, then dial back just below that ceiling, to where you capture most of what is said, and hold there. You now “read” it faster than it was ever narrated. Most audiobooks are not narrated quickly and most of us process content far faster than it is spoken. A book that would take six hours might be done in three—on a good day, in two. The right speed fluctuates day to day, so stay flexible.
If you are a reader, use this instead: The key is switching off your inner voice—the one in your head that reads each word aloud. Two ways to silence it: Run your index finger under the text to guide your eyes, or press your tongue from behind against your incisors or the roof of your mouth. Both quiet the voice reliably and, with practice, let you read faster while retaining more.
This inner voice is called subvocalization—automatic, part of the “phonological loop,” the component of working memory that briefly stores words so you can stitch a sentence into meaning. We do it because reading is, in evolutionary terms, a very young skill. The finger gives you a sense of security—you never worry about losing your place—which makes the voice easier to switch off. Pressing your tongue to your palate mechanically blocks the tiny muscle movements behind that silent speech. Use either alone or combine them. Practice regularly and your speed climbs noticeably, while comprehension does not suffer. On the contrary—it improves.
Whether you read or listen, both paths reach the same place: A pace far quicker than most people manage, which lets you make the most of your sweet spots. We all process information far faster than we believe—the brain adapts and the conscious and subconscious mind constantly work to make sense of what we take in. That is why people badly underestimate how fast they can grasp new content.
Why this matters
Do I really read a book a week? Yes. Occasionally it slips to one every two weeks, but only when I am unusually busy and must give a sweet spot to something else. On some workout days I listen instead to briefings from my team on matters I didn’t get to, or to the latest artificial intelligence (AI) developments—so much of our work, and our clients’, is now about making their businesses AI-native to beat the competition. But that is still listening to a book of sorts. So I get my “book” either way.
I had no idea readers and listeners even existed until I came across Drucker many years ago. After that, I added a few more tricks until I had the full game plan laid out here. It has let me absorb enormous knowledge across many subjects — and that breadth is exactly what lets me recognize the patterns I use to solve my clients’ most complex problems and to see solutions and opportunities others miss. That is what a book a week buys you: not trivia, but pattern recognition, judgment, an edge.
Three to thrive
1. Diagnose yourself: reader or listener. Then commit to the matching path—read it or listen to it.
2. Claim your sweet spot—the slot already hiding in your week, stacked, for listeners, onto something you already do.
3. Break the speed barrier. Listeners: playback speed just below “too fast.” Readers: silence the inner voice with finger and tongue. You can process far more than you think.
Tom Oliver, a “global management guru” (Bloomberg), is the chair of The Tom Oliver Group, the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential family businesses, medium-sized enterprises, market leaders and global conglomerates.
