Thanks for sharing Time 2 Read! Here are 5 of my favorite trigger/commitment apps and hacks to help you remember your daily reading habit without having to and staying consistent.

Commit

This is an app designed by Nathan Barry to help him build a daily writing habit. I originally used it to do the same, but you can just as well use it to build a reading habit – or any other daily habit, for that matter. I recorded this video as a bonus for a guest post I did about consistent blogging, but if you simply enter “read” instead of “write” you have a powerful trigger set up within minutes.

Coach.me

Coach.me is my favorite app to track your habits, trigger yourself and find a community of like-minded people (in this case, readers). Because I’m one of the earliest and most popular coaches on the platform, my friends from the One Year No Beer initiative asked me to create a tutorial for new users. This one uses the “No Alcohol” habit as an example, but you can of course also find reading as a habit on there.

The 10 Trigger Hack

I wanted a way to remind myself to do something that was impossible to ignore. It’s easy to click away a single notification, because they’ve become so standard. This hack blasts you with an avalanche of triggers at a specified time, making it impossible to ignore. Simple, yet powerful!

Location-based Reminders

You might know the regular Reminder app that’s on iPhones and Mac’s (and in some form surely on Windows laptops and Android phones too), but did you know you could use it to trigger yourself every time you arrive at a specific location? This is how.

Go Fucking Do It

Have you ever bet a friend that you can indeed manage to run three times a week and put $20 on it? Well, this is the same thing. Pieter Levels built this as part of a challenge to build 12 startups in 12 months in 2014. You set a deadline, commit, put money down, pick a friend to hold you accountable (who should trigger you on a regular basis) and then see if you succeed.

Surprise Bonus: Stickk

Yup. A surprise bonus within a bonus 😀 As a 6th trigger app, I recommend you try Stickk. Similar to GFDI, but with even more interaction and slightly different ways to create your stakes (for example by having your money go to an anti-charity if you fail). This forces you to report on a weekly basis, after which your supervisor judges your success, which is very helpful.