How to track reading

The problem with "read more"

"Read more" is a wish, not a habit. It has no size and no time of day, so it loses every evening to whatever is on the screen. Reading becomes a habit when it has a unit and a slot.

Pages or minutes

Sweepifi can track reading two ways:

• As a Count habit with a page target. Tap to add a page, long-press to type a number. The Read template is 20 pages a day.
• As a Timer habit with a minute target. Start the timer, read, stop. Or type the minutes in afterward.

Pages suit people who like to see a book shrink. Minutes suit people who read slow or dense things, or who switch between books and would rather not count. Neither is better. Pick the one that feels less like admin.

Why 20 pages

Twenty pages is about 20 to 30 minutes for most people and most books. It is small enough to fit on a weeknight and large enough that, over a year, it adds up to a shelf. The arithmetic: 20 pages a day is roughly 7,000 pages, which is somewhere between 20 and 30 books depending on what you read.

You will not do it every day. That is fine. The streak only breaks on days you were due and did not read at all, and a skip or a freeze covers the rest.

Give it a slot

Reading needs a time of day, and for most people that is Evening. Put it after the screens are off, and it becomes the thing you do instead of scrolling rather than the thing you do after scrolling (which never happens).

The pairing most people land on:

• Screens off before bed, then Read

Make the first one a Check habit and the second a Count habit, both set to Evening. Or add Read as a step in the Self-care Night routine, which already has a 20-minute reading step at the end.

If your evenings are unpredictable, try the morning instead: ten pages with the first coffee is a quiet way to start, and it is done before the day can interfere.

Partial days

A count habit that reaches 12 of 20 pages shows as partial. A partial day on its own does not count as done, and on a past due day it ends the streak, the same as a blank day. If you know an evening is going to be short, skip it on purpose rather than logging a partial, or lower the target to a number you will actually hit. Honest beats impressive; see backfilling honestly for the full reasoning.

Or set the target lower to begin with. Ten pages, done daily, beats twenty pages done twice a week with a guilty feeling in between. The two-minute rule applies to books too: one page counts as reading.

Keep a note

Each check-in can carry a one-line note of up to 280 characters. Use it for the book title and where you are, or for one sentence you liked. It shows up on the habit's timeline, which after a few months becomes a surprisingly nice record of what you read.

Audiobooks count

If audiobooks are how you read, track minutes with the timer and do not let anyone tell you it is not reading. The habit is giving attention to a book. The format is your business.

Try it in Sweepifi

Add Read as a count habit, set it to Evening, and put Screens off before bed just before it. If evenings are the hard part, evening wind-down routines builds the slot the reading goes into.