It sounds like you enjoy books, the problem is convincing yourself you deserve to take time to read them. To quiet that anxiety:
> The habit of reading is a meaningful way to meditatively intake large portions of information. Reading helps with creativity, focus, and communication. Reading light-hearted, entertaining books increases these skills while preserving focus for work in a way that reading the latest O'Reilly book does not, while making reading non-fiction books in the future easier because you've been practicing reading.
Separately, humans are not machines. In general, we aren't wired to constantly be doing things, and taking time to play or to enjoy stories or to do absolutely nothing is an entirely necessary maintenance task.
Removing joy and rest from your life for productivity is the biological equivalent of accumulating technical debt. This debt can intensify until you need a complete rewrite; when this happens, it's called burn out, and it's kinda really bad.
> the problem is convincing yourself you deserve to take time to read them
This hits home in so many more ways than just reading. I find it hard to do any leisure activities because doing them means I have spare time to do any of a thousand items on my personal backlog. It's very stressful.
the average audio book is 10 hours long. let's say reading a book takes 10 hours. then you only need 20 minutes per day to read one book per month. it should not be hard to find that time.
what you say suggests that you have a backlog of non-leisure activities that you feel are more important.
i solved this by making leisure activities more important. call it work-life balance if that helps. leisure is part of a healthy day. i started going for a daily walk for exercise. i considered important for my well being. i watch one tv show per day. and only one. i simply decided that is part of a healthy routine. and i made a list of what i want to watch so i don't waste that hour on random stuff. i still do spend more time on random stuff, eg youtube, but that is a different problem. when i run out of time, i stop wasting time on youtube, but i don't stop that one tv episode. i figure i have earned the break after being busy for a day. i should do the same with listening to audiobooks/stories but i haven't been able to re-establish that routine yet.
> The habit of reading is a meaningful way to meditatively intake large portions of information. Reading helps with creativity, focus, and communication. Reading light-hearted, entertaining books increases these skills while preserving focus for work in a way that reading the latest O'Reilly book does not, while making reading non-fiction books in the future easier because you've been practicing reading.
Separately, humans are not machines. In general, we aren't wired to constantly be doing things, and taking time to play or to enjoy stories or to do absolutely nothing is an entirely necessary maintenance task.
Removing joy and rest from your life for productivity is the biological equivalent of accumulating technical debt. This debt can intensify until you need a complete rewrite; when this happens, it's called burn out, and it's kinda really bad.