How to read more books this year, without a reading challenge guilt trip

The advice to read more is almost always the advice to try harder. What works better is making the book easy to pick up and making your progress visible. The readers who finish the most books are rarely the ones with the most free time; they are the ones who never have to decide to start.

Seven habits that add books

1. 1Always have the next book chosen. Decision friction ends more reading sessions than boredom does.
2. 2Keep a book where your hands already go: bedside table, bag, phone. Ten minutes in a queue adds up to a book every month or so.
3. 3Read at the same time each day. Attach it to something that already happens, like the first coffee or the train home.
4. 4Quit books you are not enjoying. A book you are dragging through costs you the three you would have read instead.
5. 5Alternate fast and slow reads. Follow a heavy novel with something you can finish in two evenings.
6. 6Mix formats. Audio for the commute and the dishes, paper or e-ink for the evening.
7. 7Log every book the day you finish. It takes seconds and it turns reading into something you can see.

Set a goal you will not resent

Look at what you actually read last year, count it, and aim for a small step above that. If you read 12 books, 15 is a goal and 52 is a punishment. Goals by month work better than goals by year: "one book a month" is checked twelve times, "fifty books" is checked once, in December, usually with regret.

What a streak is for

A reading streak is not about the number. It is a small promise to open the book every day, even for a page. People who keep a streak read on the tired evenings that a goal alone would let them skip, and those evenings are where the extra books come from.

When you fall behind

You will. A bad month is not a failed year. Pick up a short, gripping book, preferably one you have been meaning to read for ages, and let it restart the habit. Then look back at the whole year, not just the dip.