100 Books in 2021 Challenge – Gamifying Reading – Asian Parenting

Since Covid lockdown began and until our new challenge started, I think, my son read over 30 books (most Oz books, many Enid Blyton books, some Three Investigators). That means, I read over 25 books since I paid him about 25$ in winnings. See my previous post that talked about our reading challenge. Attaching both the challenge of a race with me and a reward of money gamified reading, which led to this success beyond my expectations.

Last year at work, we learned the concept of OKRs and one part of the concept was to set your sights on something within the realm of possibility but likely not.

So, for 2021, I decided to combine the two things. Have a challenge and attach a goal to it:
For 2021 (well, Dec. 19 2020 – Dec 31 2021), we’re going to challenge ourselves to read 100 books. That sounds like a lot – 2 books a week, for most weeks. If we read an hour a day, a page a minute, that’s 60 pages a day, 420 pages a week and if we assume 200 pages average to a book – that gets us to 2 books a week.

Now the challenge becomes avoiding distractions and keeping up with reading throughout the whole year. This means that my son (and well me too) has to figure out how to get away from screens long enough to read a reasonable amount to achieve the goal. If he reads more than me and gets to 25 books in a quarter, he gets 25$. So he can make 100$ in the year.

This is going to be hard and hopefully rewarding even if we get 75% of the goal.

Here’s our progress so far:

So, roughly one month into the challenge, Ahan is at 9 books – close enough that the target is a possibility and I’m at 5 so I really need to catch up (Damn you Netflix and Prime).

If you try something like this with your kids, let me know how it goes!