A simple trick to finish any book
Reading for sustained periods of time is hard, even for people who love reading, but it's not necessary if your goal is to finish a book. You can finish loads of books while reading in small chunks. That, too, can be difficult for some.
I've found a way to make it easy.
Most electronic media is designed to be addicting. Video games, TV, and social media are all optimized to hold our attention. That's not the case with books. That's why so many good books can still be difficult to finish. That's okay! We just need to acknowledge that books are not designed to hold our attention in the same way electronic media is and adjust our consumption habits accordingly.
The first step is to be content with incremental progress. If you read for 20 minutes once a day, you should be able to finish a typical 300-page book in 2–3 weeks. But even reading for 20 minutes at a time can be difficult, with all the distractions around us.
Carving out 20 minutes to read isn't enough. It's too easy to quit early. For example, in my home office, where I do the vast majority of my reading, I have my computer, filled with games I'm addicted to, and my miniature painting station, where I have a pile of miniatures I'd love to make progress on. These things call to me. It's tempting to stop reading after 10 or 15 minutes and jump to one of my other hobbies.Reading before going to sleep is the same way. It's too tempting to stop early because I'm getting drowsy. It's also training my body to prepare for sleep when I'm trying to read. Good for my sleep schedule, bad for my reading habits!
The trick is to schedule reading time right before an obligation. For me, it's getting ready for work. For you, it might be during a break at work. The goal is to make it so quitting early leaves you with not enough time to do anything else. (Sidenote: it's helpful to not be addicted to social media, since you only need a few minutes to doomscroll.)
Here, 20 minutes of reading is the perfect duration. If you try to set aside an hour, you can easily stop after 10 minutes because then you'll still have 50 minutes to do something else. Not so with 20 minutes! Stopping after 10 doesn't leave enough time to play video games, paint miniatures, or do just about anything else you might want to do.
An added bonus is, if compared to the thing you're about to do — like getting ready for work — reading even a difficult book is a joy. I want to take advantage of every minute I have.
For you, maybe 20 minutes isn't the right duration. It could be 10 minutes, or it could be 30. The point is to set a short duration with a hard stop tied to an obligation that leaves you with not enough time to do anything else if you stop reading early.