Why You Should Track Your Habits (and How to Do It Well)
I’ve been tracking my habits on and off for the past few years, but when I went through a short stay in non- tracking habits, I didn’t do a very good job of building them, either. Something about checking a habit every day and keeping a log of my progress really improves my motivation and ability to practice the habit every day.
This post originally appeared on the Exist blog .
Over time, I began tracing habits like piano and my daily French practice to more mundane habits like getting up early and planning the day before bed.
It’s easy to say that the most helpful thing about habit tracking is when I can stop tracking because the behavior has indeed become automatic, which is a sign of a strong habit. I read fiction every night before bed. Six months ago, I struggled to fit this into every day, but tracking helped me build it into a regular part of my routine.
What habits should you track?
From my own experience and a lot of research, I have learned about some of the pitfalls in forming new habits. I also learned what helps me to be successful in choosing a new tracking habit.
There are three things to consider when choosing a new tracking habit:
1. Motivation
Choose a habit that you care about doing on a regular basis. Don’t worry if others think this is important. For example, don’t try to practice every day because you think you have to . It won’t be long before your motivation for this habit weakens and you only rely on willpower to get through it (not a good idea – we have so much willpower that you will want to find a way to develop habits without relying on too much).
On the other hand, if you choose to walk the dog every day or play with the kids outdoors, these habits can be much more motivating for you personally than going to the gym. And yet they have exercises. Do you see how it works?
Find what motivation you have. You will need this motivation to keep moving forward, as habits can be a tough battle until they take hold.
2. Regularity
The more often you practice your habit, the stronger it will become. Each repetition reinforces it as a behavior and strengthens its associated pathways in your brain. After all, all this repetition makes behavior automatic, what you do without thinking about it, what we call a habit.
If you only do something once or twice a week, it will take a long time for this behavior to become a habit. You spend most of your week not doing this.
Try to find a habit that you can track every day, or at least every weekday. The more you do it, the faster you will turn it into a real habit.
3. Reachability
If you’re aiming to run 5K every day after not exercising for the past two years, you probably won’t be in the same spirit for long. To keep up with your new habit, you need to choose something achievable so that you always feel like you can do it with the effort.
The last thing you need is the ability to get in the way when you are already struggling with willpower.
If you need to pick something tiny to start with , go for it. Better is a tiny habit that you make every day than a huge one that you almost never implement.
How to develop solid habits
Before you start tracking your habits, let’s talk about how you can form persistent habits, that is, behaviors that become automatic so that you do it without thinking.
Work on one habit at a time.
Focusing on a few new behaviors at once means you won’t be able to fully focus on any of them. You make life difficult for yourself if you try to develop several new habits at the same time. Not only are you expecting too much of yourself right away, but your habits may end up competing for priority.
Let’s say you’ve developed a habit of going to the gym every morning, but trying to get eight hours of sleep every night. What do you do when you sleep late at night to get your eight hours, or go to the gym and lose sleep? If you had already developed a habit of going to the gym, there would be no questions. You would go to the gym without doubting yourself, because it’s a habit . When none of your new behaviors is yet a habit, they end up competing for your attention and willpower.
“Build” your habits
The best way to make a behavior a habit is to use a trigger to remind yourself of the need. For example, if you’re trying to get into the habit of doing 20 push-ups every morning, you can use getting out of bed as a trigger. Every morning when you get out of bed, use this as a pushup reminder.
Your trigger should be something you always do anyway. Getting up or going to bed is good. So take a shower, brush your teeth, or whatever else you’re already doing without thinking. In case you haven’t noticed, these are all the habits you’ve already acquired.
You know what that means, right? As you form new habits, you also create new triggers for yourself. If you get into the habit of doing 20 push-ups every morning, you can build on the new habit . Maybe you want to do 20 squats too. Once you’ve created a stack with these two habits, you can add a third. Maybe you want to spend some time reading every morning after your workout. So now you have a set of three habits.
Each habit that exists acts as a trigger, reminding you to complete the next one until it becomes natural to do both together. That’s when you know you can add something new to the stack.
Include time in your day
If you end your new habit anytime, any day, you won’t get the dating benefits that will help you get used to these behaviors without thinking about it.
To make your habits automatic faster, plan them for your day . Do them every day the same way, in the same place, at the same time .
Do push-ups on the floor next to your bed every morning, for example, right after getting up. Or work out in the gym at 10 a.m. every weekday. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in my experience it helps make a habit automatic much faster if your trigger and environment are always the same.
How to keep up
So you’ve picked a habit to work on and are now ready to keep track of so you know how well you are doing. How do you do it?
It depends on which one is right for you. If you are unsure, try several different methods to find the best one.
Paper
An old reliable favorite. If you use a diary or day planner, try to write down every day whether you have completed your habit or not. If you do a regular weekly or monthly review, this is a great time to review your notes to see how you progress over time.
table
If you are a spreadsheet lover, you can set up a simple worksheet to keep track of whether you follow your habit every day. This is a good way to make your tracking more visual so you can quickly see where you are going.
In fact, the app I use to track my habits was modeled on spreadsheets because they are so simple and useful.
Mobile applications
I am partial to tracking my habits using my phone. If you want to give it a try too, I’ve put together a great list of habit tracking apps on the Exist blog .
A few of my favorites to start with are Momentum (iOS) and Habit Bull (Android).
Of course, this is not all set in stone. You need to find the habit tracking methods that work best for you and use them to get better.
Tracking Your Habits: Why You Should Do It and How To Do It Right | Exists