How I Organize My Reading! || Notion, Goodreads, and Spreadsheets!

hello world and welcome back to my channel my name is kira if it's your first time here and i'm really excited to have you with me today today we are going to talk about how i organize my reading so i am a very organization focused person i love everything plans and organizing and just all of that so i am really really excited to bring this video to you guys today i'm gonna kind of take you through just how i personally keep track of my reading and how i keep track of it in a way that makes it easily exportable for things like data analysis because that is my shindig i recently have sort of figured out my perfect combination of how i can go about planning my reading and i thought it would be really fun to share with you guys first i want to go over a little bit of like a background of what i used to do so if you are a reader and you like reading quite a lot and you have a lot of interests in like other people's reviews and writing your own books and things like that you will probably have heard of goodreads um and so i have gone through lots of different tracking mechanisms specifically in the last year honestly where first i was only tracking things on goodreads and then in the previous years i have set goals in my bullet journal where it's like read such and such amount of books a year and i have a certain number of lines in my bullet journal that i have marked up and i have a way of tracking it in my bullet journal and things like that i've also just had plain notes apps on my phone that just have an ongoing list of all the books that people have recommended to me and yada yada so there are different things that work for different people personally for me all of those different methods were just it was just too many i didn't want to be retracting the same thing over and over again i didn't want to have a list on my phone a list in goodreads also a list in my bullet journal it was just i was writing and keeping track of the same thing um just in multiple places and i was like you know what i'm kind of over this so cue the star of this video which is notion if you have not yet heard of this platform it is basically just a note-taking platform not sponsored or anything like that i just recently discovered it this year and it has changed the way that my organization works um so i have my laptop right here and i thought that i would kind of take you guys through my organization so without further ado let's do that so to start out on my notion layout i have many different um lists and things like that i have personal lists for things like school and workout routines etc etc but today i want to talk about my reading lists so first of all i have a little section over here which is just titled reading lists because i'm original um and in this you start out by seeing first my tbr which is sort of my like outstanding tbr in my mind my tbr has books that are on my bookshelf that i've been meaning to read or books that i would if i'm having an issue deciding what i want to read i should go to this list first because these are books that i have been wanting to read for quite some time it's not quite as like expansive as my want to read uh list on goodreads because that's just any book that i've sort of ever been interested in um whereas in here this is where i actually put in the information for the books that i am specifically interested in reading within the next few months really um and then down here i have a separate page which is just entitled 2020 reading and that's where i keep track of most of my reading for this year so if we click on that i wanted to show you guys basically i start out by having a little database up in the front here which is just called this month's reads and so if you guys have seen my december tbr you will have seen that a few of these guys are on here a few of these books are on here and they are my plans for december um below that this is where i keep track of everything having to do with all of my books that i have read this year so i have a few different views and notion you can change the view that you're working on so to explain if i go to all this is just purely a database of all of the books that i have read this year and i was able to add in my own stats that i find interesting so for me i like to track the genre the subgenre obviously the title of the book the author the number of pages the audience that it's for my personal rating the date that i finished it so that i can keep track of how many books i read per month and then i also like to keep the month finished just because it's a little bit easier to aggregate things later on which i will show you so i have the ability to sort so i have all of these sorted by the date that i finished them so um this was the first year the first book that i finished this year and this has been the most recent book that i have finished and if i go to a different view i have made a few different sections which organize these by genre it can i can take a look specifically at just all of the lists of books that i have in fantasy or mystery or historical fiction etc etc or i can look simply by month and this is my personal favorite way of keeping track of my reading at a glance because i find it most accessible to actually see how many books i've read per month throughout the year so if i click on that view this is the one that we had up before so i can organize all of these starting with january over here and so i can choose which properties i want to have visible i.e the title here genre sub-genre and my rating if you go to the little dot dot over here and you go to properties you can decide which properties you would like to see visible so if i wanted i could make sure that the number of pages was visible for each one of them and you can see that the number of pages for each book is now visible um i personally don't need that info right there at the first glance but i do like having actually i should have the author up there as well um and so yeah this is kind of how i look at my books at a glance and also i can see kind of how many just because of the layout here it almost ends up looking like a little bit like a reverse bar graph and so i can at a glance see like oh wow what was this month october october was a really good reading month for me i read a lot of books then beginning of the year was pretty slow for me and you can see that i picked up very heavily at the end of the year with it looks like october being the most filled month so far so um just a really great way of organizing my reading personally for me because i am a data scientist and the data will always be interesting to me i do like to keep track of things like the number of pages and um the authors and things like that i have a way of actually checking to see how many different authors i have been reading from so how diverse my reading has been if i go back to my all at the bottom of your database here you can choose aggregates for each column so down here the not empty under the title is just counting the number of books that i have read this year so we can see that i have completed 45 books this year um over here i'm counting the unique so it you can say count unique values which means that it is counting the unique values of authors since it's aggregating the author column and in doing that we can see that i have read 45 books from 37 different authors that is because i typically like to read multiple books by the same author if i enjoy them obviously or finish series etc etc um and then yeah i can see a sum of the total number of pages that i've read which really is just a way of patting myself on the back and saying hallelujah because i don't have anything to measure that up against but maybe i will someday um and another thing that i like to do is just kind of take a look at my general stars um so i personally right now am sorting all of this by the date finished but if i wanted to i could sort it by the number of stars um that i have rated so if i wanted to see my top books of the year it would reorganize and restore all of that so one of the things that i love about notion so much is that you can have these very accessible user-friendly databases to your using but if you're not so much of a fan of these databases you can also just add lists so down below you can type for any command and you can just add a straight up to-do list you can sort of cater all of this to whatever you like um for all of my engineers and mathematicians etc out there the nice thing too is that you can do inline equations and i'm pretty sure that if you code in latex it can actually understand latex and html and uh compile that right in the webpage which is pretty cool um but yeah so i just love notion it is so easily um personalizable which is great also you can change the background of your cover here so i have it set in the library because we're talking about reading um and i have my little icon here set to a book because self-explanatory um the other nice thing that i like about notion is that once you have an instance created of a book so for instance in my tbr let's say so right now i'm reading crooked kingdom by leigh bardugo once i finish that i can just grab it by this little four dot and pull it down here and once i have it down there all i have to do is fill out the day that i finished it and my rating and maybe a sub-genre if i want to add a sub-genre and then there you go and then i can just automatically put it down there and i don't have to keep retyping all of this information about these books which is like my favorite thing about notion because excel and other spreadsheet based infrastructures are just not as simple as that and if i want to re do that i can just grab it and put it right back which is really really great um so yeah this is sort of the way that i organize all of my reading in notion i just adore it as i said you can use it for so many other different things the little hogwarts um harry potter marathon that we had for thanksgiving with my family i made a whole page for that and i started out with some quotes from the books all about the food and then i had a little to-do list for us i organized the menu we had a schedule for when to watch the movies and then we had a little game um to get us up and moving around while we were watching the movies since we were gonna be sitting and watching movies for like 20 hours which was nuts but so so much fun so that's basically how i organize my reading on notion and then really quickly i just wanted to talk about goodreads just briefly again this video is not sponsored by anybody these are just the infrastructures that i have found most useful to me unfortunately goodreads is linked with amazon so i personally try not to purchase from amazon as much as i can so if you are tracking things through goodreads i would recommend you not to actually order things through goodreads if you're you know if you want to read a book i would recommend using goodreads sort of just as a database and then you can go to bookshop.org or book depository or used books or thrift books or anything like that online and get either used copies or copies that support local bookshops and things like that just so that you can support small businesses it's always a good idea to support small businesses but especially right now with with um coveted and everything doing that as much as possible is honestly really great so anyway sorry mini rant over but now we are in goodreads so you can see my 2020 reading challenge over here and if i go to my books if i ever have a book that i am interested in reading or think that i might be interested in reading at some point and i want to be able to go back and be like oh what was that title again what was that book called oh yeah i want to read the little blurb or whatever it is i put that in my want to read in goodreads so because it is just so easy to search a book and you automatically have all of the information there because of the amazon database this is why i still do use goodreads so like i don't have like station 11 on my really really close tbr or my tbr in my notion app but i do have it right here because i thought oh maybe i'll be interested in reading that someday and i want it to remember the title also i can see automatically the average reading on goodreads and i can shelve it to different areas and so if i'm like feeling like reading some dystopian fiction and i'm not really sure what i want to read and i'm looking to see if somebody at some point has ever recommended something to me and i can't remember the name of i can go to my goodreads want to read and i can read that there i also do keep track of the books that i have read once i complete a book i move it to my page on notion so once i complete a book i move it from my uh this month's read to my completed reading list and i also um mark it as read on goodreads i do try to rate all the books that i read on goodreads as well and if i feel really strongly about a book i will also write a review um i try not to write negative reviews if i don't have anything like super nice to say unless i feel really strongly about it um but that may change over time we'll see but yeah um i like the way that goodreads has an ability to kind of like take a look at your reading stats it's just a little bit minimal for some of the stuff that i personally like to do and the nice thing about notion is that down here so when you have your overall database of all of the books you've read one of the options if you are a sort of like data spreadsheet kind of a person is that you can actually um export it as a csv or you can export it as a pdf anything like that and so if you want to be able to export it and then calculate your own things and make graphs and yada yada make charts and things in google sheets or excel or anything like that you can do that and all of the information will already be automatically listed with the notion file which is just honestly really really great so anyway you guys um that is it for this video thank you so much for watching you guys if you have any more questions about organization or note taking or annotations anything like that i i really do love talking about stuff like that anybody who knows me well will know that i am very planning oriented sometimes to a fault but i really feel like this has kind of ironed out all the kinks of my reading journey and has just made it really really easy to have accessible useful data um that isn't overwhelming to keep track of you know if i'm interested in reading a book in a few months i just put in the information once and then i can just move it around to all of my different um locations on notion which is really really great so thank you so much for watching you guys if you like this go ahead and give it a like if you have enjoyed my content so far feel free to subscribe down below we're growing the family it is seriously so much fun um the booktube community is just wonderful and i have just been having the best time so until the next video take care and happy december goodbye

Channel: Booked with Kira

Views: 27,293

Keywords: Books, Booktube, Reading, Vlog, TBR, Wrap-up, Review, organization, getproductivewithme, productivity, spreadsheets

Id: tJCBHB3o7BM

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020