Data: I lurve it. While some folks around here runway their reading with giant, single-spaced, hundreds-of-pages-long Word docs, and others apply good former-fashioned volume journals, I'm Team Ultimate Reading Spreadsheet (With A Sprinkle of Goodreads).

I started tracking my reading on accident: I signed upwardly for a Goodreads business relationship years agone, and it automatically keeps a tally of how many books you read each yr. Their stats section tin can also tell you how many books your read from each of your created shelves, how many pages you read, and what years the books you read were published. That'due south dainty and all (and I nevertheless use Goodreads to catalogue the books I own), but none of those stats are useful to me. I need MEAT, and then our Director of Content Rebecca introduced me to her reading spreadsheet.

Jenn invented it, and passed information technology to Rebecca. Rebecca passed it to me. And now I am passing it to y'all (with Jenn'south permission). Here'south what mine looks like- I've separate information technology in ii images so y'all tin see the column headers. Hither are columns A-G:

reading spreadsheet 1

And G-the finish:

reading spreadsheet 2

It tracks: championship, author, author gender, dates started and finished, folio number, genre, format, where I got the book, state of origin of the writer, and if the author is a POC (the original spreadsheet didn't have the source, POC, or nationality columns- I added those). Column A tracks how many of the books I finish- just add a "ane" in the column when you're done with the book, and y'all'll get a full.

Things I've learned from using the spreadsheet: without paying much attending, I read evenly between men and women. Without paying much attention, I will read almost no people of color (which is why I now pay attention). I read well-nigh exclusively authors from the USA and Great britain- something I'll be addressing with more foresight in 2015. I started the year reading most entirely digitally, and have since evened out amid formats, and increased my audiobook usage.

I know some people call up of this level of tracking as "making reading a competition" (A contest with whom? Cell 123B?), only I don't like leaving any aspect of my life unexamined. Nosotros all have our biases- whether we recognize or acknowledge them or not- and I don't like the thought of floating along on a river of my preconceived notions well-nigh what literature or genre or voices I like or don't like. I don't like reading only what I'm being sold.

This level of exam isn't for anybody, only if itis for you, here's the template to the spreadsheet. Open it, click "File- Make a Re-create" and save it to your own Google Drive. Columns J and K ("Pages to Appointment" and "Number of Books Finished") are already formulated to give you lot totals. Add together or delete columns equally you need them. It's massively customizable- if you desire to rail how many people of color you're reading, for example, only add together the column and header, put a "1" in it every fourth dimension the book is written by a person of colour, and formulate the prison cell at the lesser of the cavalcade (or wherever) to calculate the sum total of the column.

And you better believe I'grand making pie charts about the genres, formats, and sources of my books at the cease of the year. PIE CHARTS.