Why do we do it to ourselves? #blogjune Day 11

Why indeed do we do it to ourselves?  Early in June I raised in a comment to a post of @flexnib the question of why we set ourselves these challenges. I seem to be finding #blogjune particularly hard this year and I have been wondering why. This year for #blogjune I have set myself the task of doing 60 blogposts, 30 on this blog Hecuba's story, and 30 for the Collingwood Historical Society blog.

It didn't seem so hard last year, or have I forgotten?  Last year I did #blogjune for myself but rather than limiting myself to this blog which is about technology I scattered my posts over three of my blogs and talked about quite different things.  I created recipes and blogged about them, I read books and reviewed them, and I did posts on technology.  It was easier somehow to diversify.  We also did #blogjune in MPOW.  But we divided the 30 posts amongst three blogs and @tapsister developed a roster.  I was responsible for ensuring that the requisite number of posts were done on Telling Tales, the family and local history blog, but I sub-rostered some of that out to @bookwoman2000.

So this year I decided to stick to my technology blog and have a mini-challenge within a challenge. I think I decided this partly because of #anz23mthings.  And it's good.  It is causing me to thing about why I use apps and to talk about tech things. But it is harder, if I am honest with myself.  And Collingwood Historical Society?  So far I have done all the blogposts myself and there are certainly many things to post about.  But I think that I am going to ask for assistance - ask for topics people would like to see blogposts about, ask for people to write them! In fact that sounds like a good blogpost for today and won't require me to do the research I was going to do for a couple of others. I would really like more people engaging with the blog and this is one way to do it.

But to return to the initial question? Why do we do it?  Each year I set myself annual challenges and I usually blog about them in the course of another challenge the #blog12daysxmas, both in retrospect and in prospect.  This year was no exception.   I have probably posted enough here about why I heart Flickr and it plays a big role in my challenges. But I had really intended to post today about another challenge I do most years and use technology to monitor.

Goodreads! Goodreads!  Yes, each year I set myself a challenge of the minimum number of books I want to read.  I started doing this a few years ago when I was worried that I wasn't reading and was losing my book knowledge.  Yes, the tech stuff was always there to overtake it.  I reviewed various online tools at the time and finally decided to go with Goodreads.

I am always modest in the goals I set myself as I don't want to set myself up for failure.  Nor do I want to make reading, something I have loved all my life, a chore that needs completing.  So this year I have set myself the modest goal of 52 titles in 2013.  One a week. So how easy is this?  I set myself an annual challenge of 52 books, I record everything I read on Goodreads. Wrong!  Goodreads apparently doesn't like me rereading titles and doesn't count them in the total for the challenge.  Me, I love rereading and relishing old favourites. But I have a way around this.  I register the books I read in 2013 on my "read in 2013" shelf.  I know that I have 53 books on that shelf currently and 7 of those are ones that are works in progress.  So according to my calculations I am well in advance of my challenge. Unfortunately Goodreads thinks I have read many fewer.

Does anyone know how I can get Goodreads to count my rereads as part of my annual reading challenge?  It probably doesn't matter much in the scheme of things but I wish I could do it. #firstworldproblems