Part of my “New Year’s resolutions” (for lack of a better description) was to track what media I consumed in a more organized way.

Movies in Letterboxd

Letterboxd has been around forever, and is a popular way to track and review movies. Trackt is another option here, and if you prefer that, I recommend Cinema Time, but the concept is similar.

There is a social aspect to Letterboxd, so you can choose to follow some people if you’d like to see what your friends are watching (I’m mattbirchler there), but for me it’s how it makes documenting movies easy.

Just open the app, tap the + at the bottom to add a new diary entry, search for the movie you want, and just give it a rating. I almost never leave a written review, but you totally could if you want.

Your Letterboxd profile has a “recent activity” feed which I screenshot and share on Twitter for fun. Hat tip to Timothy Huneycutt for the idea.

Letterboxd is free, but you can pay for a pro subscription and you basically get some more elaborate filtering options (like “show me movies on my watchlist that are on Netflix”) and an annual review with a bunch of stats presented in a fun way. It’s totally not necessary, but it’s fun.

Books in GoodReads

This one is a little harder to explain, but the concept is the same as Letterboxd. You can log what books you’re reading, and leave reviews for them when you complete them. There is also a social aspect, and you can follow me at mattbirchler there as well.

The big difference here is that since books typically take more than one sitting to read, you can track your progress through books. I do this because I find it fun to update the progress bar on each book, but you can also just mark a book as “I’m reading this now” and then mark it “read” when you’re done.

I also like that you can set up reading challenges. I have one set up to read 25 books this year. And of course, there is a year-end compilation of your reading stats to show you how much you read and a few other stats that are pretty interesting.

GoodReads is free, and as far as I know there is no paid tier.