Reading habit tracker: paper, printable or app?

My first reading habit tracker wasn't really a tracker. It was the Clock app on my iPhone. I'd start the timer when I opened the book and stop it when I finished. That was it.

I never used a paper tracker. The timer was enough to see how long I actually read, and to keep the habit visible.

If you're searching for a reading habit tracker, you'll find printables, bookmarks, spreadsheets and apps. The good news: the format matters less than you'd think. It just has to match how you live.

What a reading habit tracker should record

Most printable templates give you a title, an author and a star rating. That's a book log. A habit tracker answers a different question: did I show up today?

So the only thing that really matters is:

• The day. Did you read, yes or no?
• A small minimum. Something you can hit on your worst day. Mine is 10 minutes.
• Minutes first, pages second. Minutes are the habit: ten minutes of a hard book count the same as ten minutes of an easy one. Pages tell you how far you are in the book. I time the session and log what I read when I stop.

Everything else (ratings, quotes, reviews) is nice, but it's a second job. Add it later, once the habit holds.

Why record anything at all? A meta-analysis of 138 experiments, with almost 20,000 people, found that monitoring your progress toward a goal helps you reach it. The effect was modest, and larger when people recorded their progress, in a diary for example, and when they reported it or made it public (Harkin et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2016). Most of those studies were about health goals, like eating better or moving more, not reading. One finding carries over well, though: monitoring a behavior changes that behavior. So track the reading itself, the days and the minutes, not just the books you finish.

Paper, bookmark or printable

Paper is a perfectly good tracker. I'd say the best one for some people. A few ways to do it:

• A printable monthly grid. Taped inside a cupboard or pinned next to your desk. Cheap and visible.
• A bookmark tracker. A strip with 31 small circles, or a row of boxes, that lives inside the book you're reading. The tracker is in your hands exactly when you'd read. That's its strength.
• A notebook or bullet journal page. One line per day: date, minutes, book.
• A calendar on the wall. Mark a dot for every day you read.

Where paper breaks down is visibility: it only works if you see it. A sheet buried under the mail reminds you of nothing. If you go this route, put it where your reading happens, not where your tidying happens.

I'll be honest about something else too. Book Reading Habit doesn't produce a printable or a PDF tracker. If a physical sheet is what you want, make one. It takes five minutes, and a grid of boxes is all you need.

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is the middle ground. One row per day, a column for minutes, a column for the book. A simple formula can count your streak.

It's flexible, and you own it. The cost is friction: you have to open the file, find the row and type. On a tired night, that's often enough to skip it.

An app

An app earns its place when the friction of paper is what's stopping you. It's with you on your phone, it can remind you, and it can do the counting.

My timer worked, but it only measured. It didn't remember which book I was reading, or show me a week of sessions. I was timing my reading so often that I built Book Reading Habit to keep it all in one place, and to keep it quiet. Here's what it actually does, and nothing more:

• You start a focus timer when you sit down to read, and the session is logged when you finish. You can also log a session by hand if you forgot the timer.
• You set a daily goal in minutes. Your streak counts the days you read, and streak shields can protect it if you miss a day.
• Reminders nudge you at the time you pick.
• Your sessions sync through iCloud on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

It's a tracker, not a place to read. You read your paper book, ebook or audiobook wherever you like, then track it.

Try Book Reading Habit on the App Store

How to choose

Don't pick on features. Pick on where you'll bump into it.

• Read in bed with a paper book? A bookmark tracker is hard to beat.
• Always at your desk? A printable grid or spreadsheet is fine.
• Read on a commute or in scattered ten-minute gaps? An app is probably easier.
• Want to share it with someone? Book Reading Habit has private reading groups: you share your streak with people you invite.

You can also mix them. Nothing says you can't have a bookmark in the book and an app on your phone.

Set it up so it survives a bad week

Whichever you choose, a few rules helped me:

• Make the minimum embarrassingly small. Ten minutes, or even five pages. Not a stretch goal. A floor.
• Tie it to something you already do. A study on habit apps found that reminders helped people repeat a behavior but got in the way of it becoming automatic. Cues tied to an existing routine made it more automatic (Stawarz, Cox and Blandford, CHI 2015). "After my coffee, I read for 10 minutes" beats a phone alert at 9 pm. Use a reminder to get started if it helps, but let the coffee be the real cue.
• Decide what a miss means. One missed day is a miss. Two in a row is the real risk. Plan for it before it happens.
• Don't track what you won't review. If you never look at the ratings, drop the column.

If you want the longer story behind these, I wrote about it in how to build a reading habit that sticks and why tracking your reading habit works. And if you're curious how the iPhone side works, there's how to track your reading on iPhone.

The best tracker is the one you see

I didn't need a fancy tracker to start. A timer on my phone was enough, because it was right there when I sat down with a book. Now it's the timer in the app, and a book on the table.

Pick the format that gets in your way the least, set a minimum you can't fail, and start tonight.

If you'd like an iPhone, iPad and Mac tracker built around exactly this, Book Reading Habit is on the App Store. The core tracking is free.

Happy reading.