How I Still Find Time to Read (With 6 Chihuahuas, 2 Cats, a Job, a Marriage, and a Manuscript)

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be running a household with six chihuahuas, two cats, a full-time job, a marriage, and an author career — and still finishing books — I would have laughed and asked what I was supposed to cut out of my day to make that happen.

The truth is, I didn’t cut anything out. I just stopped waiting for the “perfect” reading conditions to show up.

The Myth of the Quiet Reading Nook

There’s this idea that reading requires silence, a cup of tea, and an empty afternoon. If that’s what you’re waiting for, you might wait forever — especially when you’ve got eight animals who each have their own opinion about what you should be doing right now.

So I let go of that image entirely. My reading life doesn’t look like a candle-lit corner. It looks like:

• Ten minutes with a paperback propped on the counter while dinner simmers
• An audiobook playing while I untangle six leashes for a walk
• A chapter read on my phone while waiting for the vet to call my name (again)
• Reading in bed with a cat pinning down one arm and my husband asleep next to me

None of these moments look like “reading time” in the traditional sense. But stacked together, they add up to real books finished, month after month.

Audiobooks Changed Everything

I’ll be honest — audiobooks are doing a lot of heavy lifting in my life right now. Walking six chihuahuas isn’t exactly a peaceful stroll, but it is uninterrupted time where my hands are busy and my mind is free. That’s prime audiobook territory.

Feeding time, litter box duty, folding laundry, cooking — these used to be “dead time” for reading. Now they’re some of my most productive listening hours. I don’t treat audiobooks as a lesser form of reading. A finished book is a finished book, however it got into my head.

Protecting Small Pockets Instead of Chasing Big Ones

As a working wife and author, I don’t have the luxury of a wide-open afternoon very often. What I do have are small pockets of time scattered through the day — and I’ve learned to protect those fiercely instead of waiting for a bigger one that might never come.

That might mean:

• Reading for 15 minutes before anyone else in the house is awake (pets included)
• Keeping a book in every room so I never have an excuse of “it’s not nearby”
• Using breaks at work for a chapter instead of scrolling my phone
• Treating reading like a non-negotiable appointment with myself, even if it’s short

Fifteen minutes doesn’t feel like much in the moment. But fifteen minutes a day is almost two hours a week — enough to finish a novel most months.

Writing and Reading Feed Each Other

People sometimes assume that being an author means reading falls to the bottom of the list — that writing eats the time reading used to have. For me, it’s the opposite. Reading is fuel. When I stop reading, my writing gets stiff and uninspired. So even on my busiest weeks, I treat reading as part of the job, not a luxury I’ll get to “someday.”

That mindset shift made a huge difference. I stopped feeling guilty about reading when I “should” be writing or doing chores, because I finally understood that reading is doing the work.

Letting the Chaos Be Part of the System

Six chihuahuas and two cats do not care about my to-do list. There’s always a mess, a bark, a demand for attention, a vet appointment, a 2 a.m. zoomie session. I stopped trying to build a reading routine that assumed calm, and instead built one that assumes chaos and works anyway.

That means:

• I don’t need silence to read — I need a book within reach
• I don’t need a free evening — I need five spare minutes and permission to use them
• I don’t need my pets to cooperate — I just need to read around them, not instead of them

Once I stopped fighting the noise and started reading through it, everything got easier.

The Real Secret: Lowering the Bar on What “Counts”

If I only counted the days I read for a solid hour in peace, I’d barely read at all. Instead, I count every stolen page, every dog-walk audiobook chapter, every three paragraphs read while the cats fight over a sunbeam.

Managing time with this much going on isn’t about finding more hours. It’s about noticing the ones you already have and refusing to let them slip away unused.

So if you’re juggling pets, a job, a relationship, and a passion project of your own — you don’t need a perfectly organized life to keep reading. You just need to stop waiting for one.