Develop Reading Habit with Habitify

1. Get the right reminders you need to read every day, even the busiest one

Daily Briefing every morning and Daily Wrap up every night

One helpful productivity tip often adopted is to review our to-do list every morning and every night. Habitify supports you to do this with 02 special automated reminders:

• Daily Briefing in the morning: You can check out your to-dos when your day starts, so you are prepared with the attention that reading is not something optional, but something must-do.
• Daily Wrap up at night: You can view what you have and haven’t done, so you never forget to make some time at the end of the day for reading, even on your busiest days.

Finding time to read between the smallest intervals

Now you are well reminded that reading is really something on your to-do list, you’ll have set up an intention for your day that you will try to read. 

People say when there’s a will, there’s a way - if you notice, there is plenty of time during the day where you can read books: typical moments include breakfast, lunch break, or when you’re commuting to work. 

In this case, audiobooks should be a better choice than printed ones. There are several amazing audiobooks apps for you to choose from.

And to make sure things go according to plan, you could set up multiple reminders for each of those tiny little free time. You would be surprised at how much time it adds up.

‍Additional tip: Use Habitify to set up a reminder every morning so you never forget to bring along your book/kindle. This urges you to get straight to reading whenever you find any bit of time during the day.

Never miss a reading reminder - Habitify is always with you

In addition, with Habitify available on all platforms (iOS, MacOS, Android, Web), you wouldn’t miss any reminder no matter where you’re at. 

Whether you’re on your phone, or away from it working with your laptop, we make sure your reminders reach you.

Once a reminder pops up, tap “View” and you can either start reading with our timer by tapping “Start timer”, or hit “Snooze” if you’re busy and wish to go back later. In case you have actually done reading for the day but have yet to open Habitify to log your progress, all you need to do is to tap “Complete” whenever this reminder shows up.

Habitify’s reminders don’t just remind, they motivate

When it comes to developing habits, there are so many things we can work on. But if there were one thing that could change the entire game, that would be motivation. Motivation keeps us going. Motivation fights procrastination. Motivation pushes us beyond our expectation. 

More importantly, motivation could come in many forms, and each different way would determine how long the habit lasts. After years of supporting our users to build long-term habits, Habitify team learned that the best way to motivate is motivational reminders.

With this integration, which is available on Android, we try to make sure you get motivated regularly, yet not being distracted from important things you need to do as the day goes on. You don’t have to watch a 10-minute motivational video to get enough encouragement. These swift notifications would take you at most 10 seconds to push you forward, in your planned direction.

2. See your progress beautifully visualized to get extra motivation 

You don’t have to wait for weeks to see your habit progress

The hardest part of maintaining any kind of habits is keeping up our motivation. This is because motivation often comes from feedback - the result of our effort. The easier we see our progress, the more satisfied we feel, and the faster we go. 

However, the harsh truth about habit-building is that we don’t get to see our progress clearly. For example, you have been hitting the gym trying to get six packs. Despite your insane effort in the past two weeks, you don’t seem to see any changes in your belly. 

This led us to create multiple visualizations of your progress, so that you not only know that you ARE making progress, but also see how you’re progressing in beautiful, insightful charts.

Complete your reading session, check the habit done, and enjoy seeing your streak immediately lengthen with a lovely rewarding sound. You can also find out how many consecutive days you have maintained your reading habit with our Streak count. 

Other progress statistics like completion rate, daily performance and weekly goals would allow you to view your progress from different perspectives, helping you to not only see, but also understand your progress better.

Additional tip: To get the best view of your progress like above, check out Habitify Web.

This type of feedback-based motivation especially works well in a situation where your busy life somehow drags you away from your current reading habit. Seeing how far you have gone for your streak would give you more incentive to put in a little more effort to protect it.

Skip to protect your streak

For days when you’re just really busy or exhausted, and you have no choice but to skip a day of reading, breaking your streak would probably leave you feeling a bit demotivated. We don’t want that, so we came up with an idea tailored for you busy folks: Skip. 

Normally, when not completing a habit, users should mark it “Fail”, which breaks the streak. But with “Skip”, your streak is safe. You can also swipe to the Notes section to journal down the reasons that kept you from reading.

The day after skipping, Habitify would remind you to keep reading. This should minimize the possibility of you dropping your reading habit for too many days, hence saving you time and effort getting back on track. 

3. Try a new way to reflect your reading process with Notes

Jotting down excuses for skipping your reading habit is not the only thing you could do with the Notes feature. Many of our users have been using Notes to write down key points they learned from their books.

As keen readers, we know that it’s important to note down things we learn after reading a book, because if we don’t, we might later forget (almost everything) what we read. 

While you may have several ways to note down learning points from books: having your own book-journal, typing to your Google Doc, publishing them on social media or even Goodreads…, why not exploring a new, convenient way with Habitify?

For those who choose to read on the bus, if you want to note down something about your book, you can simply take out your phone and use Habitify Notes, instead of having to wait till you reach home, get your book-journal and realize the ideas that popped up earlier have gone by half.

Habitify Notes might look simple, but it is actually this simplicity that allows users to do more. Below are more suggestions on how you can make use of Notes when developing your reading habit:

• Summary of what you have learned
• Use it as a weekly review of your reading habits
• Note down the books or articles you want to read
• Write small reviews 
• Have a collection of quotes

4.  Don’t just track. Improve your reading routine with Statistics

If we are trying to track our reading progress, it's important to notice that the ultimate goal of tracking is not to just track, but to review and improve. 

With Habitify’s world of Statistics, you would find helpful insights to better your reading routine. Here’re some suggestions on how you can use our datas to plan for improvement.

Completion Rate

If you have a busy busy week hence do not read very often, you will see the results of your low performance on the Completion Rate graph. 

It’s necessary to bring such a dip to your eye, because without facing up to your low progress, you are likely to ignore it. Seeing your progress visualized clearly would help you stay alert and urge you to prepare better for the upcoming weeks.

Check-in Time

Whenever you complete a habit and check it done, Habitify records your Check-In time. With the Check-In time frequency graph, you could see what time during the day you often read most and make adjustments in your daily schedule to read even more.

For example, if you see that you’re most “productive” when reading at night, then you might consider clearing up your evening routine for reading by moving other tasks to afternoon.

Summary

When it comes to reading, it’s never about finding time to read, it’s about making time to read. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg could be the busiest ones in the world, yet also making their names as famous readers. So if you’re dedicated to books, do make time to read, don’t give up, and constantly improve your reading habit with Habitify.