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Starting a new reading planner is exciting, but staying motivated to use it all year can be harder. Life gets busy, routines change, and suddenly your planner is sitting untouched.
The good news is that you don’t have to use your planner perfectly. These simple tips can help you keep your reading planner or reading journal useful, enjoyable, and easy to stick with.
Not sure whether the Planner or Tracker is the better fit for your reading habits? Here’s how they compare.
Out of sight, out of mind applies to reading planners, too.
Keep your reading planner somewhere you’ll naturally see it every day:
For a reading planner, keeping it next to your current book is especially helpful. When you finish reading, your planner is right there!
Don’t make using your planner a completely separate habit. Attach it to something you already do.
Try updating your reading planner:
For example, make completing a book review part of your “I finished a book!” ritual. The easier it fits into your existing routine, the more likely you’ll keep doing it.
This is one area where it’s worth staying relatively caught up.
Your calendar pages can be flexible. If you miss a few weeks, you can pick up where you left off.
Book tracking is harder to catch up on later. Once you’ve read several books, you may forget when you read them, what you thought about them, or the little details you wanted to remember.
Try to update your book tracking when you finish each book or within a few days. Don’t worry about filling out every calendar page perfectly. Just make book tracking a priority so you don’t end up with a giant stack of books to record later.
If your reading planner feels like another chore, you’re probably not going to stick with it. Make it something you actually enjoy opening.
Use your favorite pens. Add stickers and your favorite highlighters. Decorate your monthly pages and write down memorable quotes. There is no “right” way to use a reading planner.
A reading planner can be more than a place to record the books you’ve finished. Use it to create little goals and challenges throughout the year.
You can:
Having something to work toward gives you another reason to open your planner, even when you’re not actively tracking a book.
Don’t panic. If you haven’t touched your calendar pages in a few weeks, skip ahead and start from today.
If you’ve fallen behind on book tracking, set aside a little time to catch up. You don’t have to do everything at once. Start with the books you remember best and work your way forward.
“If falling behind happens a lot, it might be less about willpower and more about how the system is set up. We go deeper into that in [why generic planners don’t stick, especially for ADHD brains].”
The secret to using your planner all year isn’t perfection. It’s creating a system that fits naturally into your life. Keep it visible, connect it to your reading routine, stay caught up on your books, make it fun, and give yourself reasons to keep coming back.
Your reading planner should add to your reading life, not feel like another task on your to-do list.
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