So you’re ready to learn how to set reading goals? Reading goals are an excellent way to start creating good reading habits, and can be instrumental in developing and growing you as a reader. But it can be difficult to know what reading goal to choose. So if you’d like help choosing a reading goal, here’s a step-by-step guide to setting reading goals that will help you know for sure you’ve chosen the right goal for you!
Still wondering why you should set reading goals? Check out these reasons!
The Basics of Setting Reading Goals
We’ll get into the step-by-step method I use to set my reading goals in a minute, but for now let’s just cover the basics of setting reading goals. Your goal should be:
- Specific enough and realistic enough to actually achieve
- Measurable, so you know if you’re making progress
- A little bit of a stretch so you have a challenge to reach for
- Time-bound, aka you need a deadline for when the goal ends or should be reached
- Fun!
You should also know why you want to reach for this goal so you have a purpose to keep you going, and should be tracking your progress toward your reading so you know if you’re actually on track to reach your goal. (Reading trackers are a great way to record your progress!)
How to Set SMART Reading Goals
Ok, so now you know the basics for setting a reading goal, but what’s next? Here’s the tried-and-true process I use to set and achieve my reading goals!
Have you heard of the acronym SMART before? SMART is an acronym to help guide the setting of goals and give better results. It was first proposed in 1981 by George T. Doran, but there are several variations of the acronym that have come about since then. For our purposes, we’re going to use the following to guide setting up our reading goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound.
What do each of these mean and how do they apply to setting your reading goals? Let’s walk through them one by one.
1. Set a Specific Goal
“Specific” is the first word in the SMART acronym, and the meaning of this is that your goal needs to be narrow enough to be ONE goal. It can’t be a goal that encompasses lots of things.
For instance, let’s say you want to read more and understand literature. While on the surface it seems like these could be one goal, it’s actually too broad. You need to narrow it down to choose one goal—either reading more OR understanding literature better.
Why is this? Well, because while there is some overlap between the two, the strategies needed to achieve each of these goals will be slightly different. If you’re goal is to read more, you’ll need to pick up books and read. But if your goal is to understand literature, you will need to read more but might also need to do background and context work, enroll in a literature class, talk with people who know more about literature than you do, etc.
These are different goals with different steps needed to achieve the result you want, so you should treat them as different, specific goals. Of course, you can work towards multiple goals side-by-side, but you should be sure to separate them in your mind so you always know exactly which goal you’re working toward in any given moment.
For the purposes of our example, let’s choose “read more books” as our specific goal and look at how this plays out with the rest of the process.
2. Make Your Goal Measurable
The next step is a super important one for setting smart goals, so be sure you don’t skip this one! You need your goal to be measurable.
What does this mean? Well, let’s take a look at our goal from the last step: “read more books.” Can you measure “more”? What does “more” mean? More than what? Now, you may have some vague idea of what “more” means to you…probably “more” than you read in the past, or more than you read last year, or more than you read last month.
But is it easy to know if you’ve reached “more”? How will you know when you’ve reached your goal? It’s possible you will know, but it’s easier to know when you can point to the evidence showing your progress. And that’s where the word “measurable” comes in.
If we modify our statement to say “read 52 books,” then you now have a measurable statement. After all, 52 is much easier to measure than “more”. Now, if you’re wondering if you’re actually doing the goal you set for yourself, you can simply count the number of books you’ve read and see how far along you are on the way to reaching your goal.
The number of books you read isn’t the only way to measure your reading, though. I give lots more ideas for reading goals here, but in short measurable can also include things like how often you complete the task (every day, each week, etc.), how many days in a row you read, the number of times you read in a year, etc.
But whatever way you take the “measurable” part of your goal to mean, having an actual metric to track and actually keeping track of it (like in a reading journal!) will be a huge help in trying to reach your reading goal.
3. Make Sure Your Goal is Achievable
Ok, so where are my fellow dreamers? The ones who like to dream big…but sometimes dream too big? If you’ve ever gotten caught up in the excitement of the idea of growth and achieving big things, then this next step is especially important for you. You have to make sure your goal is actually achievable. Actually realistic.
While I love and absolutely advocate for creating reading goals that will stretch you, it’s important that you don’t create a goal that’s the equivalent of trying to leap to Hawaii from California. What do I mean?
Well, if you’ve only read 3 books in the last 5 years, it miiiiiight be a bit much to out of the blue decide you’re going to read 200 books this year.
While that’s a little bit of an extreme example, some of us can get caught up in the possibilities and forget to check in on reality. In fact, if you’re in the boat of only having read 3 books then even reading 52 books (one per week) might still be a bit much.
Instead, it would be better to set a more reasonable and achievable goal, and if you surpass it then that’s awesome! But at the least, you’ll be much more likely to actually reach your goal. So maybe it’s better to modify our statement to “read 12 books”.
All that matters here is that the goal works for you. That it’s achievable for you, not for the ideal version of you that you wish existed. Because if you can’t actually reach it, then you won’t get the excitement and dopamine from achieving your goal…and you’ll be much less likely to want to continue forward with your reading goals in the future.
4. Make Sure Your Goal is Relevant
The next step in creating your reading goal is to make sure your goal is relevant. What does this mean? Essentially, just that you know your “why”. You know why you want to achieve this specific goal.
Maybe your “why” is because you want to create good reading habits (or banish the bad ones!). Maybe you want to become a bookworm for the first time, or maybe you want to start enjoying reading again. Or maybe you have a fellow bookworm friend and you want to beat his or her record for number of books read in a year 😉
There can be any number of reasons your reading goal is relevant to you and exciting for you, but the key takeaway is that you should know why it is important to you so that you have a purpose and can remember that purpose even when the going gets tough.
5. Set a Time-Bound Goal
Lastly, your goal needs to be time-bound. This simply means that you need to have an actual time limit attached to your goal, so you have a deadline and can’t just tell yourself “Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow” over and over again.
Now, you’ll still need to make sure the timeframe you set is realistic and achievable, like we mentioned earlier. You can’t expect to read 200 books in a week. But also, if you set a goal to read one book in a year…well, for many people that also wouldn’t be realistic or helpful because it’s too low of a goal and likely won’t stretch you at all. And you might end up procrastinating.
Instead, try to choose a good and reasonable timeframe. Goals of one year are super popular (New Year’s resolutions, anyone?), as are monthly goals as well. Choose what makes sense for you and for the goal you’re setting, but in our case we could say “Read 12 books this year.”
This is an excellent example of a goal you could set, because it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. It means you read one book a month, which for our example of someone who hasn’t read much recently is a good and reasonable goal that is both achievable and likely a little stretching as well.
The reading goal you ultimately choose might look different depending on your circumstances, but applying this step-by-step guide to your own circumstances will help you personalize a goal for yourself that is not only exciting but achievable!
Need help actually reaching your reading goals? Check out these tips that will help you achieve your reading goals this year!