How to track reading progress without turning it into a chore

Track exactly one number per book: the page you stopped on. Percentage, pace, days since you last opened it, and whether the book is finished are all derived from that number plus the page count. Anything you have to type in addition to it is a chore you will abandon by the third week.

Why a page number rather than a percentage?

Because you can read a page number off the book in front of you without doing arithmetic, and you cannot read a percentage off anything.

This matters more than it sounds. The moment a tracking system requires a calculation, a judgement ("about a third?") or a category ("mostly done"), it has introduced a decision into a moment that should take two seconds. Decisions are where habits leak. A page number is the only progress measure that is already printed on the object you are holding.

Percentages are still useful — they are just an output, not an input.

What about chapters, or time spent?

Chapters are uneven. A forty-page chapter and a six-page chapter both count as one, so "three chapters in" tells you nothing comparable between books, and nothing at all across a team's shelf.

Time spent measures effort rather than progress, which sounds virtuous and is not. Twenty minutes on a dense page of Hume and twenty minutes on airport fiction are the same number and different events. Worse, timing turns reading into a performance you are grading, which is a reliable way to stop enjoying it.

If you want one number that is comparable within a book, between books and between people, it is the page.

When should the status change?

Automatically, from the number. A book with a page count above zero is being read; a book whose page number reaches the last page is finished. Status is a consequence of reading, not a second thing to remember — and any system that asks you to mark a book finished separately from recording the last page will eventually disagree with itself.

This is how Marginalia does it: type the page, and the status follows. There is no "mark as read" button because there does not need to be one.

How do you spot a stalled book?

By the date, not by feeling. A book you have not touched in three weeks is stalled whether or not you still describe yourself as "reading" it, and the record is the only thing that will tell you so honestly.

Once you can see it, you have a real decision to make rather than a vague guilt to carry: finish it, or quit it deliberately. Both are fine. Carrying it around unexamined for four months is the option that costs something. There is a fuller test in how to finish the books you start.

Does tracking ruin reading?

It can, if you track the wrong things. Streaks, badges, public leaderboards and yearly targets all move the reward from the book to the scoreboard, and the predictable result is people finishing short books to protect a number.

One page number per book does not do that. It has no opinion about whether you read enough, it just refuses to let you misremember. That is the useful half of tracking, and the rest is gamification wearing a cardigan.

Tracking for a team

The same rule holds, with one addition: everyone's number should be visible on the same shelf. A team reading the same book with individual private trackers has no idea whether the discussion should happen next week or next month; the same team with one shared shelf can see that four people are past page 90 and two have not started.

That is a scheduling fact, not a judgement, and it is most of what a workplace book club needs to stop dying.

The short version

• Record one number: the page you stopped on.
• Let percentage, pace and status be derived from it.
• Never make "finished" a separate action.
• Use the date on the record to find stalled books.
• Skip streaks and badges; they reward the wrong thing.