Reading List with Note Taking and Stats Tracker

We tried to make this template easy-to-use and intuitive, therefore some guidance may come handy.

The first section is here for your to swiftly navigate to the book you are reading now or go to databases to change something.

▶️ Reading now and ⏩ Up next are views of the 📚 Books database with applied Stage filters: In progress and To do accordingly.

The second section displays your reading statistics and recently finished books.

To create a new book, go to the 📚 Books page. There you can use any of provided views to create a new record.

By default, all new books will be having Inbox status, unless you’ve added them to specific stage in the board view.

Next stage is To do - the book(s) from the Inbox stage you plan to read next. Simply drag-and-drop a book between stages in a board view or change this property directly.

The same way you can change other stages: In progress - the book(s) you currently are reading; and Done - finished ones.

The process is straightforward:

The only 2 field you need to fill so system could calculate your statistics and progress are:

This Notion reading template features yearly goals. I think it’s optimal period to set targets and measure performance, because completing a book may take up to month in some cases.

Making notes while reading non-fiction books allows you to better understand and retain the information, relate it to other knowledge you have, and easily find and reference specific points later on. It also helps to actively engage with the material and improve critical thinking skills.

I recommend writing down notes by your own words, that way you truly understand the idea. If you prefer a fast way, you may copy-paste the text in case of reading e-book, or use the OCR feature of your smartphone to copy-paste the text from a printed book.

To do it, apply the 📖 Book template for your page in 📚 Books database. This template will create sections for you to fill.

📖 Book template features a 💭 Essences linked database to store the most valuable information from the book.

I like to write down 📝 Notes while reading the book and fill up 💭 Essences from 📝 Notes after I'm done reading it. This way, I'm able to see the most important things from all the books I've read from a single view - a much more convenient way than opening each book and reading notes.

I also like to categorize essences by type:

Optionally, you may save the page containing the essence so that you can come back to it later for the full context. Alternatively, you can add larger text containing this part inside the essence page itself.

Briefly, it has 4 interconnected databases:

The main database you’ll be working with is 📚 Books: you create new pages, fill out properties and changing books’ statuses. Let’s jump into components a bit more.

Every view of a 📚 Books database by default has enabled filter Stats contains My reading stats, meaning all new pages in 📚 Books database will be automatically linked to My reading stats page of 📈 Stats & goals database.

It’s a workaround to aggregate statistics from all pages since Notion databases doesn’t have a pivot table functionality (for now I hope).

From the relation we have with 📚 Books we are able to rollup values from this database:

Using “This year” numbers we can calculate the progress of Books goal and Pages goal using simple formula:

Basically it replaces blank value with zero if any of properties are empty. After it it divides current progress on goal value and rounds it up so percentage value will always be an integer.

Properties you see on the main properties aren’t those that are used for calculations, because last ones do not provide the context of a number.

To fix it, there are a separate fields for stats we display in the card on a dashboard. They end up with “display” (e.g. All time books to display). Those properties take the value from calculated field and merge it with text that describes it, for example:

Also, there are several Spacers blank text fields. They are used to create gaps in the card to visually divide sections.

The core component of our Notion reading list is obviously books. It’s fairly simple, all you need is to fill a few properties: Title, Subtitle, Author, Categories, Total pages, On page, Date.

The only mandatory field is Title, but I recommend filling up all of them. First of all, Total pages and On page are required in order to track the progress. Secondly, authors, categories and cover images make your dashboard more pleasant, inspiring you to use it more often.

Formulas used here are pretty basic: