I decided to start tracking my reading within Notion because I wanted one place to keep all my notes and reviews about a book as well as how many books I read in what time frame. Goodnotes is attractive for the community and pre-logged titles, but I felt it wasn’t as personal or capable of tracking my thoughts and reactions to the book as I went along.
Being an avid user of Notion, I decided to create a book tracking library with the note-taking capability to complement my other life tracking pages. After logging in everything I’ve read in the last year, and my current reads, I realised the one thing I was missing from the Goodreads experience was the “progress bar” that shows how far along I am in a book. I’m the kind of person who reads 10 books at a time, so it’s good for me to have a quick look at how far along I am so I know when I’m neglecting a book too much for too long.
THE STEPS
1. Create three columns, one for pages completed, one for the total book pages and another for the loading bar.
This step can either be done at the far right of a table or within a page in a gallery. Note that the “pages read” and “total pages” have to be set to the number kind of property, and the loading bar must be an equation.
2. Scroll through this page and choose your style of the progress bar. Ben Smith, an even bigger notion fan, created this lovely page of code references that you can use to create a loading bar in a style that suits you! I choose the full loading bar with squares, but there are so many other cool ones here also. You could also mix it up and do something else if you take a minute to analyse where the output is listed in the code
Please do consider tipping Ben on his “buy me a coffee” page, his work is fantastic!
3. Paste the code into the “formula edit” box and change the names of the columns (they’ll be in green text) to whatever you named your columns. In my case, “pages completed” and “total pages”. You can change any of the green variables to different emojis or symbols as well
4. Input the number of pages into the columns. Personally, I find it tedious to fill in data for all of my books, instead, I only do it for my current reads. You could, however, for the sake of storing information, fill this section out for each of the books in your tbr also.
5. In gallery mode, show your loading bar by selecting it in “Properties” “Properties” at the top right of your database decides what is visible on each card as a preview. Depending on the type of books displayed and preference, you can toggle on or off which information you would like to be displayed. On my “currently reading” page, I’d like to see my progress, so I’ve turned on the “loading bar” formula column we’ve just created so it’s displayed without having to go into the individual book pages to see it.
—— If you found this helpful please DO consider tipping Ben Smith who developed the code and created this wonderful catalogue of designs. If you’d like to see more tips like these and updates from me, follow me on medium and Instagram.