Wednesday, January 1, 2020

On Books and To-Read Organizing

I stumbled across these posts on organizing your reading list, and I felt inspired to share my system because figuring out a way that worked for me was a wonderful thing. 
I’m an avid Goodreads user (more on that below) but I’ve never much liked their “To-read” feature, for reasons I don’t really understand. Then I was inspired by this post on Lifehacker, which lead me to Trello. I have a few Trello boards, and I found that the website combined with the App help me keep track of my cultural to-do lists better than anything else I’ve tried (and believe me, I think I had tried them all). For me Trello’s advantage is how quickly I can add something to the list. 

This is my Trello books board - the list on the far left is the “Backlog list” meaning it’s something that I want to read at some point. Same with the “Kindle” list, which are ebooks I have and want to read. Since I get 90% of the books I read from the library, I need a to-read list that helps me keep those organized. The “To-Do” column are the books I have out from the library (with their due dates), and the “Reading” column is the one that I’m currently reading. Once I finish the book, I log a review of it in my Goodreads account and move it to the “Finished” column. (The finished column is starting to get unwieldy, so I may also break it down by year). Then I have the Trello board linked to the Google Calendar, so the book due dates show up on my Google Calendar.

I know some people don’t use Goodreads all the time, but putting a review there, or even marking it as read in Goodreads allows me to do a couple of things: 
I have an IFTTT recipe set up that takes the books from my Goodreads read shelf and puts them in my Google Calendar. (There’s no real advantage to that, I just like seeing them in there cause I think it’s cool).
Once I log the books in Goodreads, I also go through and add them to my Google Tracking sheets. You can export the data from Goodreads, but it can take a while to clean up, and I'd rather just do that work in small increments throughout the year by entering them as I go rather than clean up at the end of the year. Here's a link to a copy of my tracking template, if you want to save a copy then you can enter your books and the pretty charts will self-populate at the bottom of the spreadsheet. 


The Google Spreadsheet has other sheets with TV and movies, and the Trello account has other boards with TV and movies too. Then at the end of the year, they are turned into nice infographics that I post on Instagram. 


Happy tracking!