Most reading trackers count the wrong things: books finished (too rare to motivate) or minutes read (too empty to mean anything). The tracker that actually works counts bite-sized, task-based units of the book itself - "pages 41 to 48," checked off, done. Break the big book down, choose a daily bite you can genuinely finish, and the reading habit - and the finished books - follow on their own.
You didn't abandon that 600-page book because you lack time, and not because you lack discipline. You abandoned it because "read this book" is not a task. It's an adventure. An adventure that takes weeks of effort, no obvious next step, no moment where you can say "today I did my part." Nobody can do an adventure on a Tuesday.
A reading tracker works best when it tracks bite-sized pieces of the book itself - pages, not minutes, and not finished books. Most trackers get this wrong in one of two ways, and the fix is the same idea that powers everything we build at HeroMode: take the big thing, and break it down into small tasks with a clear finish line for every single day.
Why Counting Finished Books Doesn't Build a Reading Habit
The trophy-shelf tracker - log a book when you finish it - measures something real, but it rewards you maybe a dozen times a year, and only after the hard part is over. During the three weeks you're actually working through a book, it says nothing. Worse, it quietly punishes ambition: pick up a doorstopper classic (looking at you, Gödel, Escher, Bach), and your tracker goes silent for a month, right when you need it most.
"Read 15 Minutes a Day" Tracks the Wrong Thing Too
This standard advice fixes the frequency problem and introduces an emptier one. We've written before about why time-based goals disappoint and task-based goals motivate, and reading is the sharpest example. Time passes whether or not you engage. You can stare at the same page for 15 minutes, mind adrift, and your tracker will happily record a success. Deep down you know that "15 minutes" says nothing about whether the book moved forward - which is exactly why completing it doesn't feel like much.
A task-based unit can't be faked that way. "Pages 41 to 48" either happened or it didn't. When you check it off, you know precisely what you accomplished - and that certainty, small and humble as it is, is what generates the pride that keeps a habit alive.
Break the Book Down: Bite-Sized Quests with a Clear Finish Line
Here is the move, and it's the core of HeroMode's whole philosophy: the book is the adventure, big and intimidating. So you don't track the book. You cut it into quests - each one a specific handful of pages, small enough to finish in one sitting, defined enough that "done" is unambiguous.
We learned this on the most notorious book on our shelf: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, the famous boar-cover book that half the software field owns and few finish. It defeated us the normal way first - parked at an early chapter for months. What finally worked was cutting its 12 dense chapters into quests of about 15 pages each in HeroMode. Suddenly there was always a next bite, and each bite always fit the evening, and every completed quest was proof the boar was losing ground. Finishing that book remains one of our proudest completed adventures.
Above: The original DDIA adventure in HeroMode, circa 2022 - the big book as one adventure, decomposed into quests of ~15 pages each. This was Checkbox Reader before Checkbox Reader existed.
Choosing Your Bite Size Is the Whole Skill
How many pages per bite? There's no universal number - and that's not a weakness of the method, it speaks to how this method can be customized to each unique person. Deciding takes a little honest math about your own reading speed and your actual days, and that thinking is precisely what the "pick a duration, done" advice skips. Deliberate practice begins with deliberately designing the task, as Ericsson and Pool argue in Peak. And designing a task that fits you requires understanding your own appetite. An important part of deliberate practice is precisely the self-reflection and personalized planning.
Finding my own size took exactly that kind of self-reflection. For one book I got ambitious: 18 pages a day. I'm not a fast reader, and the disconnect showed: every day I struggled to keep up. So for my next book, I adjusted: an easy-breezy 10 pages a day schedule, which brought back the joy of a reading habit.
Above: What the joy accumulates into - a shelf of five-star reads.
The Philosophy, Mechanized: From HeroMode Quests to Checkbox Reader
For years our reading tracker was simply HeroMode used this way - adventures for the big books, bite-sized page quests inside them, points and rewards on completion. That manual pattern worked so well that we eventually built it into a dedicated app. This app, Checkbox Reader, does the breaking-down for you. Add a book, choose your pages-per-bite, and the book becomes a collection of checkboxes.
Above: Each book becomes a series of checkboxes - a few pages per bite, chosen by you.
Reading a bite and tapping its checkbox is the entire daily loop. Consistency shows up as a byproduct: my current daily streak stands at 90 days!
Above: Today's bite, checked off - day 90. The current book is cut into 34 bites of about 12 pages each.
How to Read More Books
You don't need an app for this method. You can start with any book and a pencil:
- Track bites of the book, not minutes and not finishes. A bite is task-based: specific pages, unambiguous "done."
- Choose a bite size you can finish on your busiest day - and reflect and adjust every book. Too-big bites turn reading into a chore; keeping the joy alive is important.
- Let the counts be byproducts. Streaks, finished books, yearly totals - they accumulate on their own once the daily bite is right. Chasing them directly is how trackers end up tracking the wrong thing.
Above: The byproducts, accumulating on their own - streaks, and a decade of books completed by year.
Both HeroMode and Checkbox Reader are available on the App Store - but you don't need our apps to start. Take the book you've been avoiding, find tonight's bite, and read just that. The book is an adventure; you only ever have to do one quest at a time!