Tips, Not Prompts: a guide on how to build and keep the reading habit - hosted by bibilly

📚 Use habit trackers as a form of reward and look for Storygraph challenges to motivate yourself
Or make your own, in case you don't find challenges that fit your taste/tbr. I search for the ones I need, but I've posted a lot as well. And they're always public, even when the challenge is too personal or specific and I know there won't be many people joining it. When people do join my challenges, it's even harder for me to ignore them.

My current favorite, however, is the streak feature. When this setting is on, it tracks your reading activity, making a streak counter visible from the homepage, where you can further customize your streak parameters by clicking on it. I'm not good with page goals, so I use this feature just to track my reading habit, setting my streak to one page a day, but it still hurts when the streak goes back to 0 (currently, I'm trying to build a routine with 3 fixed reading moments, so I've increased the minimum of pages to 15, a number I can easily double and still be like "I need to sit and read so it doesn't piles up"). To make it easier and help you follow other good habits as well as get rid of bad ones, download a simple habit tracker app. That way, as long as you read at least one paragraph, you won't break your reading streak, even when you're too tired. You'll end up reading multiple pages most days anyway. It's also possible to customize these apps by choosing how many times a week the task has to be done instead of the daily standard option — especially useful if there's always a day in the week with no free time or if your work schedule only leaves a specific open window for reading. Consistency over quantity always.

Having said that, joining challenges is not useful at all if you don't want to complete them. They have to motivate you, not be a burden (see tip 4). Remember: commit to the reading habit, not a book or a challenge.

If you don't know where to start with Storygraph challenges, here are some I've created for myself:

Nobody has added any books to this prompt yet!