A daily reading goal you can keep on a bad day

A daily reading goal app works best when the goal is small enough to reach on your worst day and big enough to matter over a year. ReadFirst lets you set a daily page goal for your printed books, shows how close you are on the Today tab and keeps track of every day you reach it. Ten pages a day is around 3,650 pages a year, which for many readers means a dozen books or more.

The goal sits next to ReadFirst's app lock but is separate from it. Your rule decides when your locked apps open. Your goal is a promise to yourself, and it never locks or opens anything.

How it works

You pick a number of pages, read, and ReadFirst counts each page toward today's goal.

1. Open your goal in the app and choose 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 or 50 pages a day, or type any number up to 200.
2. Read your printed book and count the pages with a live page photo.
3. Watch today's progress fill up on the Today tab and in your widgets.
4. When you reach the goal, the day counts as a goal day.
5. At midnight a new day starts with a fresh goal.

How to pick a goal you will keep

The best daily reading goal is the one you can still reach on a tired Tuesday. If you are coming back to reading after years, start with 2 or 5 pages. It feels almost too easy, and that is the idea: you sit down, you finish, and you often keep going.

If you already read most evenings, 10 to 20 pages is a steady pace for a typical novel. You can change your goal whenever you want, so raise it once the small one starts to feel automatic. A goal you reach 25 days a month does more for your reading than a bigger one you often miss.

Motivation only, never a lock

Your reading goal is there to encourage you and never controls your apps. Missing it does not lock anything, and reaching it does not open anything. That is the job of your reading rule, for example one page for 15 minutes in your locked apps.

Keeping the two apart makes both easier. You can set a gentle rule for getting into your apps and a more ambitious goal for your reading, or the other way around. And if you only want the tracker for now, set the minutes in your rule to 0. ReadFirst then runs in Track only, and every page counts for your book, your goal and your medals.

Your goal in your charts

Every bar chart in your reading stats shows your daily goal as a line, so you can see at a glance which days cleared it. The week view shows pages per day, the month view does the same across the month, and the year view adds it up month by month.

That line turns a vague feeling ("I read a bit this week") into something clear: four days over the line, two under, one day of rest. It also shows how your reading compares with the same point last week, month or year.

Goal Days, Perfect Week and Double Goal

Every day you reach your goal moves you toward the Goal Days medals in your reading medals. There are nine steps: your first goal day, then 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 365 and 500 goal days. They do not need to be in a row, so a missed day never takes one away.

Three medals in the Again and Again section are built around your goal, and you can earn each of them as often as you like:

• Perfect Week: reach your daily goal on all 7 days of a calendar week.
• Perfect Month: reach your daily goal on every day of a month.
• Double Goal: reach twice your daily goal on the same day.

Your goal and your reading streak work together but count different things. The streak asks for one page a day. The goal asks for your full number. On a hard day, one page keeps the streak. On a good day, the goal is waiting.

Who it's for

ReadFirst's reading goal tracker suits adults who read printed books and want a daily rhythm instead of a yearly number they only check in December. It fits people who like a clear finish line each day, people restarting a reading habit with a small goal, and readers who want to see over months how often they actually hit it.

If you prefer goals in hours, books per year or audiobook minutes, a general reading tracker may suit you better. ReadFirst counts pages of printed books.