How to Set a Reading Goal You'll Actually Hit (Books, Pages or Minutes?)
Most annual reading goals die by February. Learn whether to count books, pages, or minutes, and how to pick a number you will actually reach.
By Daniel Daneshi July 31, 2026 8 min read TL;DR: Annual book-count goals fail because they are outcome goals with no daily behavior attached. Set a process goal instead: minutes per day is the fairest currency, pages works for print loyalists, and books-per-year is best kept as a loose annual marker. Audit your last 3 months, set the floor low, pair the goal with a streak, and shrink it (never abandon it) when life happens.
Every January, millions of readers pledge a number. In 2024, more than 9 million people joined the Goodreads Reading Challenge and pledged over 356 million books, an average of nearly 40 books each (Goodreads).
By February, most of those goals are already on life support. Not because readers are lazy, but because “50 books this year” is a badly designed goal. Here is how to design a better one.
Why “50 books this year” fails by February
Resolutions collapse fast. Strava analyzed over 800 million logged activities and found that most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by the second Friday of January, a date now nicknamed Quitter’s Day (Inc.).
The problem is the shape of the goal, and goal-setting research explains it. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who spent 35 years studying what makes goals work, found that specific, appropriately difficult goals reliably outperform vague ones, but only under certain conditions: the goal must match your actual capability, and you need regular feedback on progress (Locke and Latham, 2002).
“Read 50 books this year” breaks both conditions:
- It is an outcome goal, not a process goal. It names a result 12 months away but no behavior you can do today. You cannot “do” 50 books on a Tuesday evening. You can do 20 minutes.
- The feedback loop is broken. In week 3 you have finished 1 book of 50. Are you on track? Behind? The number is too big and too far away to tell you anything, so it stops motivating and starts nagging.
- The number is usually borrowed, not measured. Most people pick 50 (or 100, or whatever a friend picked) without checking what they actually read last year. A goal calibrated to someone else’s life fails Locke and Latham’s capability condition on day one.
The fix is not to abandon goals. Specific goals genuinely work. The fix is to change the currency and the calibration.
The three goal currencies, compared honestly
You can measure a reading goal in books, pages, or minutes. Each has a real trade-off.
| Books per year | Pages per day | Minutes per day | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Outcome goal | Process goal | Process goal |
| Daily feedback | Very weak | Good | Excellent |
| Distorts book choices? | Yes, toward short books | Slightly, toward easy pages | No |
| Fair to slow readers? | No | Partly | Yes |
| Works for audiobooks? | Awkwardly | Poorly | Perfectly |
| Best used as | Loose annual marker | Print reader’s daily target | Primary daily goal |
Books per year: motivating, but it warps your shelf
A book count is satisfying to announce and easy to compare. That is also its weakness. When December arrives and you are 4 books behind, a 900-page epic becomes your enemy and a novella becomes a strategy. The goal starts choosing your books for you, and it chooses short.
Keep a book count if you like it, but treat it as the scoreboard, not the game. If a big book is dragging the count down and you are no longer enjoying it, that is a separate decision, and our guide to when to DNF a book covers it.
Pages per day: steady, but format-dependent
Pages give you daily feedback, which already makes them better than a book count. 20 pages a day is a real instruction for a Tuesday evening.
The catch is that a page is not a unit. A page of dense nonfiction, a page of a thriller, and a “page” of an ebook at your chosen font size are different amounts of reading, and audiobooks have no pages at all. If you read mostly physical books of similar density, pages work well. If you mix formats, they wobble.
Minutes per day: the fairest input metric
Time is the one currency every reader shares. A minute of a slow, careful reader equals a minute of a fast one. A minute of audiobook equals a minute of print. You control it completely, it never punishes you for choosing a long or difficult book, and it gives you perfect daily feedback: you either read your 20 minutes or you did not.
The arithmetic is also kinder than people expect. A meta-analysis of 190 studies puts the average adult silent reading speed at about 238 words per minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction (Brysbaert, 2019). A typical adult novel runs around 90,000 words (ProWritingAid). That is roughly 6 hours per book, which means a modest 20 minutes a day quietly compounds into about 20 books a year. Half an hour a day gets you to 30. Nobody who reads 20 minutes daily feels like a “50 books” person, yet the math gets them most of the way there.
This is why minutes are the primary goal currency in booksense: you set per-period targets in minutes, pages, sessions, or books, start the built-in timer when you read, and watch the progress bar fill without doing any bookkeeping. Readers on booksense have logged over 480,000 minutes and finished more than 12,000 reading sessions this way.
How to pick your number
Locke and Latham’s capability condition means the right number comes from your data, not your ambition. Three steps:
- Audit your last 3 months. Honestly estimate (or check your app’s stats) how much you actually read. Not your best week. The average, including the weeks you read nothing.
- Set the floor embarrassingly low. Take that average and go slightly under it. If you truly averaged 10 minutes a day, your goal is 10 minutes, maybe 15. A goal you hit 90 percent of days builds the identity of someone who reads daily. A goal you hit 40 percent of days builds the identity of someone who fails at reading goals.
- Ratchet up on evidence. After 4 to 6 weeks of hitting the target comfortably, raise it by a small step: 15 to 20 minutes, 20 to 25. Never raise it because you feel guilty; raise it because the current number has become easy.
If the audit reveals you are barely reading at all right now, start even smaller and read our guide on how to read more books first. The goal comes after the habit has a pulse.
And if you are wondering how your number stacks up against everyone else: the median American reads about 2 books a year, so almost any deliberate target clears the bar. The full breakdown is in how many books the average person reads, useful as trivia, useless as a goal.
Close the loop: streak plus weekly review
A daily goal answers “did I read today?” Two more loops make it stick, and both come straight from the feedback principle in the goal-setting research.
The streak is the daily loop. Hitting your minutes target extends a visible chain, and the chain itself becomes a reason to read on the days motivation is missing. Streaks have their own failure modes (all-or-nothing thinking, mostly), so it is worth understanding how reading streaks actually work before leaning on one.
The weekly review is the calibration loop. Once a week, spend 2 minutes on your stats: total minutes, sessions finished, pages covered. You are asking one question: is the goal still the right size? Trend lines answer it faster than memory does, and if you track sessions in booksense, the weekly numbers are already waiting for you.
When life happens, shrink the goal (do not abandon it)
At some point you will fall behind. A work crunch, a sick kid, a book that turned into a slog. The instinct is binary: either heroically catch up or quietly declare the goal dead. Both are wrong. The catch-up sprint turns reading into a debt, and a dead goal provides exactly zero pull. There is a third option: renegotiate.
- Behind on a 30-minute daily goal? Drop it to 10 until the crunch passes. Ten minutes keeps the habit alive; zero kills it.
- Behind on an annual book count? Lower the number without ceremony. A goal is a tool for your reading, not a promise to an audience.
- Stalled on a book you dread? That is often a slump talking, and slumps have specific fixes; see how to get out of a reading slump.
A shrunk goal you keep beats an ambitious goal you abandon, every single time. The reader who does 10 minutes a day through a brutal month is still a daily reader in the month after. The reader who quit in March is starting from zero next January, pledging 50 books again.
FAQ
How many books should I read in a year?
There is no correct number. The average adult reads around 238 words per minute, so a typical 90,000-word novel takes roughly 6 hours. At 20 minutes a day, that works out to about 20 books a year. Audit your last 3 months, set a target slightly below what you actually managed, and raise it once you are hitting it comfortably.
Is it better to set a reading goal in books, pages, or minutes?
Minutes per day is the fairest metric because it is a pure input: you control it completely, it does not punish long books or slow reading, and it works for audiobooks. Pages per day is a good middle ground for print readers. Books per year is fine as a rough annual marker, but it quietly pushes you toward short, easy books.
What should I do if I fall behind on my reading goal?
Shrink the goal instead of abandoning it. A goal you are 10 percent behind still pulls you forward; a goal you have mentally written off pulls you nowhere. Cut the target until it feels almost embarrassingly easy, rebuild the daily habit, then ratchet back up.
Do audiobooks count toward a reading goal?
Yes. If your goal is measured in minutes, audiobooks count automatically and fairly. This is one of the strongest arguments for time-based goals: a books-per-year target treats a 6-hour audiobook and a 30-hour epic as the same unit, while a minutes target credits you for exactly the attention you gave.