When I was not reading at all, when other distractions were too great to take some off and concentrate to read, the book database site Goodreads saved my reading habit. They have a ‘challenge’ thingy on their site. You pick a number, any number, and declare it as your yearly goal. That is, how many books you'd like to read in any particular year. When you read a book within that year, you add it to your profile and the challenge updates itself towards the goal. When you reach your goal at the end of the year, the site congratulates you!

However, the challenge itself is not really forcing you to read. First and foremost, it's a challenge against you and your reading habit. You're competing against yourself only. You can always change the number of books you'd like to read at any given time. Also there's no monitoring tool to make sure whether you've actually read the book or not. You can manually add books stating that you’ve read it in that particular year—it will count against the challenge. Re-reads also count. So, if you want to, you can always cheat. There’s another way to exploit the challenge. Since every book counts as one book, no matter the genre, size or publication date, or whether it’s 10 pages or 1000 pages, you can read several easily accessible, small books to pass the challenge with flying colors.

But... should you? You might pass the challenge, sure, but the only one who’ll lose is, not surprisingly, You. You cannot cheat with yourself after all!

So, Goodreads challenge is not designed to be hard. Rather it’s a passive force to remind you that you’ve decided to work on your reading habit. It’s certainly a positive thing.

Sadly, from 2021, I’ll no longer take part in the challenge. This is a personal decision that is only applicable to me. I've used it to help my cause hitherto and now it's not helping anymore. The challenge can be a double-edged sword. There was always this risk—that the challenge will sabotage its purpose. The sight of the rising number and the absurd satisfaction that oozed from it to take over. I had to be vigilant about the transition period—for the exact moment when I thought about the challenge more than the books. And I think it's time to stop relying on the cane.
I won't be actively tracking the challenge anymore (actually I’ve put in a negligible number for participation's sake).

But seeing the number of participants in the challenge rising each year makes me happy. What was around 3 mil in 2016, became 5.3 mil in 2020 and hopefully more in the upcoming years. If the challenge is pushing more people to books, that’s always a win in my book.

If you’re interested, you can head over to goodreads for information.
https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/11650-2021-reading-challenge