She Was Reading Most Weeks. The Page Total Told a Different Story

Maya kept a book beside her bed. Some nights she read a chapter. Other nights she opened it, got through a few pages, and fell asleep. By the weekend, she remembered the evenings when she'd picked it up and felt she'd been reading quite a lot.

Then someone asked how her book was going. She checked her bookmark. She hadn't got nearly as far as she'd expected.

She wanted reading to stay part of her life after the excitement of a new book wore off. But "read more" gave her very little to look back on. She could remember reading; she couldn't say how much she'd actually read.

A weekly goal, without a nightly schedule

Maya chose 50 pages a week as a starting point. She didn't want to assign a reading slot to every evening. If Tuesday was busy, she could read on Wednesday instead.

In Habitor: Build Real Habits, she created a habit called Reading, selected Weekly, entered a goal of 50, and used page and pages as the unit forms.

That gave her a target for the week, while leaving her free to decide when to read.

Three evenings, 35 pages

After each session, Maya added the number of pages she'd just read. On Monday she recorded 12. On Wednesday she added 8. On Saturday she added another 15.

By Saturday night, she'd read on three evenings. That felt like a fairly consistent week. The recorded total was 35 pages against her goal of 50, leaving 15 pages to go.

Both things were true: she'd made time for reading, and she'd read less than she'd planned. Seeing the amount alongside the goal made the gap easier to understand.

She recorded each session's pages, rather than her bookmark's page number. Moving from page 80 to page 92 meant adding 12, not 92. She didn't need to keep a timer running while she read.

A goal she could work with

Maya kept recording for a few more weeks before changing anything. Her totals usually landed between 30 and 40 pages. Fifty had sounded reasonable when she'd set it, but it wasn't what she was regularly making room for.

She changed her weekly goal to 35 pages. If she later wanted to read more, she could try leaving her phone in another room or finding another evening for her book, then look at the records again.

She could also open Insights to see her recorded days and cumulative page total. Those records gave her a way to look beyond the evenings that happened to stick in her memory.

The number didn't tell her how well she'd understood the book. A dense chapter might take longer than an easy one. It simply made her reading amount visible, so her next goal had something concrete behind it.

Maya still wanted to become someone who kept reading for years. For now, she had a smaller question to work with each week: how much had she actually read, and what did she want to try next?