Track Your Actions Before You Do Them
Recently I went through a “habit change” – I carefully studied my habits and asked myself which ones I want to keep, which ones to give up, and which ones to replace.
Doing yoga for 30 minutes every morning? Yes, it’s a good habit.
Eating lunch while browsing social media and Reddit? This habit needs to be broken. (I love the idea of giving myself a mental break, but I realized that most of that time I hate reading the subreddit group – and I didn’t like it.)
Solve “feeling tired” by eating a bunch of candy? This habit must be abandoned as soon as possible. It’s okay to have candy every now and then, but I never eat just one. I’ll go to the bakery across the street from my apartment, buy a box of truffles, English toffee, or a cup of peanut butter, and then eat the whole box at once.
So I added a few lines to what I call my Daily Table, where I track everything from sleep to mood and bowel movements, and tagged each one with a habit that I would like to add to my life, or a habit that I wanted to remove from my life.
The next morning I woke up, opened my daily spreadsheet and filled out each cell with one word: YES.
YES, I haven’t read the Internet with hate all day (although the day has just begun and I haven’t even checked my email yet).
YES, I haven’t eaten candy all day (although I haven’t even had breakfast).
YES, that evening I went to bed on time (although I just woke up).
You get the idea.
By filling out my spreadsheet before the start of the day, rather than using it as a way to communicate how the day went, I found myself documenting my positive changes in habits ahead of time.
This meant that I stayed true to my habits.
Because I already told myself that I had.
I have been maintaining this daily table for six months now, and the move to pre-logging was important as it helped me make the choices I want to make during the day.
This is similar to the “record food before we eat” strategy for those of us who use food trackers: telling ourselves that we will eat during the day, we do not need to make decisions at the moment. We already know that we will be playing Baba Is You during lunchtime instead of scrolling through Reddit and Twitter (which is how I got rid of the hate reading habit), or that we are going to take a walk after lunch.
I should also point out that pre-recording my habits helped me figure out how I need to improve my habits – because I recently discovered that the “I won’t overeat sugar” pre-recording didn’t actually stop me from eating all the chocolate. I bought the protein at a candy store (instead of rationing it for a few days). This means that I needed to change the habit of “not buying more than one serving of candy at a time.” If I buy a box of butterscotch or chocolate protein, I eat it all at once, so my new habit is to buy only one truffle or one finger of butterscotch and only once a week.
And I’m going to stick with it because I already told myself I would.