How long does it take to read Atomic Habits?
by James Clear
5h 52m
88,000 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 12 days.
That is 12 sessions with Atomic Habits.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How we worked this out
Atomic Habits is about 88,000 words, estimated from its 320 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 52 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished Atomic Habits, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Atomic Habits at a glance
- Pages
- 320
- Author
- James Clear
- Genre
- Self-Help
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Atomic Habits alongside each other, one session at a time.
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