The Goodreads Reading Challenge needs a leaderboard. For example, Fitbit displays your rank amongst your friends based on how many steps each has taken that week. This encourages competitiveness amongst friends to take more steps. (Or cheat with Unfitbits style hacks.) Knowing that I am a thousand steps behind a friend is motivation to find ways to take some additional steps to pass them.

Looking through the 2015 reading challenge stats page, it looks like I am around 6th of the 25 friends doing it. A couple people are within 5 books ahead of me, so I might be able to catch them. Back when I hit a dry spell this data might have been motivation to spend a bit more time reading and a bit less time watching TV.

Of course, on Fitbit I am in 11th place with the top five doing at least double my number. Nor is the steps a metric I really care to track. I’m only very interested in the heart rate. With Goodreads, to me the number of books is a bad metric as I’d prefer a number of pages.

One friend has 299 books read, which is uncatchable by my 52 books. Of course, it looks like 90% of this friend’s books are children’s books averaging 20 pages. Our page counts are much closer. Take out the books for the friend’s kid and we are at about the same number of pages.