I have what I call a “checklist mentality,” meaning I’m most motivated by checking things off my list. Measurable goals resonate with me and excite me, while vague, progress oriented goals are more difficult for me to work towards or stomach. That sometimes makes reading a bit difficult, since reading is checklist-oriented in small ways, but not always in bigger ways.
Goodreads challenges help my checklist mentality a lot. It gives me a way to easily measure my progress and check things off as I work towards a concrete goal. I love that.
Other sorts of reading goals are difficult for me. Something abstract like “I should read more science fiction” or “I’d like to learn more about David Bowie” aren’t usually helpful. I tend to lean more towards “I ONLY READ SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS NOW” rather than “I’ll read a few and that will help me be a better sci-fi reader”.
That’s why finding The Herd Presents 2017 Pick Your Genre Challenge really spoke to me. The challenge requires readers to pick a certain amount of books to read within a chosen category, thereby allowing me to have a checklist to finish while still reading books outside the genre. It’s a helpful tool to use and it’s useful to be accountable to other bloggers to achieve my goal.
So here is what I’m doing: I’m committing to read 15 sci-fi books this calendar year (since sci-fi is legitimately a genre I want to learn more about). Since this only recently became my focus, I’m still pretty far off, but I have several months in which to work towards this and hopefully get it checked off.
What are your bookish goals? Are there any genres you’re working to read more of? What cool bookish challenges have you participated in?
In general, I'm a very goal oriented person and I love the idea of reading challenges, but for some reason, I have a hard time keeping up with tracking my progress or actually using a challenge to drive my reading choices. I'm starting to do a little better at it this year, but your post made me wonder if I should pick a single goal at a time to really dive into. I think narrowing my challenge choices down this year helped and maybe having a single goal at a time would be even better :)
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean - it's easy to say in one moment "I want to read x amount of books in this genre" and then feel completely different when you're actually picking out your next book to read.
DeleteGood luck picking a reading goal and tracking it:) That can be quite the challenge!