How to track your reading year

by Bitz n Bobz Co.

A reading log has exactly one failure mode: it asks for more than you will give it. If logging a book takes five minutes of typing, you will stop, usually around book four, and the record you wanted will not exist.

So the rule is simple. One line per book, entered in under thirty seconds, and everything else calculated for you.

What to record

Six fields is enough:

From those six, a tracker can tell you how much you read, when in the year you read most, which formats you actually get through, and whether your taste is broader than you assume. None of it needs typing twice.

What to leave out

Skip the full review field. It feels like the point and it is the thing that kills the habit, because a half-written review makes the row feel unfinished and unfinished rows stop you opening the file.

If you want to remember why a book mattered, one line is plenty. A sentence you will actually write beats a paragraph you will not.

Skip publisher, ISBN and edition too, unless you have a specific reason. You are keeping a record of your year, not building a library catalogue.

Rate honestly, and use the whole scale

Most people's ratings cluster between three and five, which makes the rating useless. If almost everything is a four, the number is not telling you anything.

A three should mean fine, and it should be common. Keep five for the handful you would press on someone else. The value of the scale comes from being willing to use the bottom of it.

Count pages as well as books

Books read is the number everyone quotes and it is the more misleading one. Twelve novels of six hundred pages is a heavier year than forty of two hundred, and a books-only target quietly pushes you towards short ones in December.

Track both. Use pages as the honest measure of the year, and books as the one that is fun to say out loud.

Log the ones you abandoned

Put down the books you stopped reading, with the page you reached. This is the most informative data in the whole file and the part everyone leaves out because it feels like failure.

Four abandoned books in a row is not a reading slump. It is usually a sign you picked four books for the wrong reason, and the pattern is visible only if you wrote them down.

Audiobooks count

Record them, mark the format, and stop arguing with yourself about it. The format column exists so you can see the split without having to make a judgement about it. Most people are surprised by how much of their year is audio, and that is a useful thing to know when planning the next one.

Do not let the TBR become a second job

A to-read list is worth keeping. A to-read list of four hundred books is a source of guilt, not a plan.

Keep a short list, maybe ten, of what you might genuinely read next. Everything else can live in your head or on your shelf. The tracker is a record of what you did, not a debt sheet of what you have not.

Look at the year properly in December

Once you have twelve months, three things are worth actually looking at.

When you read. Almost everyone has two dead months. Knowing which ones are yours is more useful than resolving to read more, because you can stop treating a predictable dip as a personal failing.

What you rated highly. Look at the fives and find what they have in common. It is often not the genre you would have named.

Where the pages went. If one format accounts for most of your pages, that is the format to feed next year.

Setting next year's number

Take this year's actual total and add a little, or nothing at all. A target built from what you really did will be met. A target built from the reader you would like to be gets abandoned in March, along with the tracker.

A tracker that does the counting

Our Ultimate Book Tracker works on the one-line principle: enter the six fields and the totals, monthly pattern, format split, rating spread and progress against your target all build themselves. It has room for abandoned books and a short to-read list. Excel and Google Sheets, instant download.

More in reading and life trackers.