Want to spend more time reading with your kids but think you’re too busy? To paraphrase a marketing term, you can’t improve on what you can’t measure. One way to measure is to borrow a technique libraries use to encourage reading over the summer and keep a record of what you read to your kids and how much time you spend doing it. Go one step further and record the number of pages in each book. By the end of the year you may be amazed at the number of pages you read. When you look back on all the books, you can even revisit them by talking about your favorites.

You may also find motivation by joining a community like Good Reads, where you can list what’s on your personal list to read and then mark books off and give them ratings as you finish them.

The key is to give any system you think may work for you a try, then stick with it for a while.