How to track your habits and improve your life

With the right intentions year after year, why do we so often fail in our resolutions? I don’t know the answer, but I have two ideas. First, they are bold. There’s nothing wrong with big goals, but in order to be sustainable, and last into the following year, goals must be actionable. Secondly – and I think this is the biggest reason why we get stuck in our success – we start chasing our goals without realizing what our lives currently look like or how we really spend our time.

Being aware of your habits puts you in the driver’s seat and, in my experience, helps you set more appropriate and achievable goals. So how do you become conscious? By tracking your habits. With all the energy piled up behind New Year’s resolutions, keeping track of habits can seem a bit negative. Who has time to track their habits when what they really need to do is work on becoming the best version of themselves?

everyone.

Because when you start tracking habits, you’re more likely to set achievable goals, so you won’t have to start from next year. Progress must be preceded by awareness, otherwise you don’t really know where you come from.

A few months ago, I started carefully tracking my habits. I had an idea of ​​how I spent my days, but I wanted to get clear on what I really spent my time doing. I already knew I spent most mornings writing (I think) and went to yoga a few times a week (I think). Once I tracked my habits, I saw the discrepancy between where I thought I was spending my time and where I actually spent it. This awareness has led me to some amazing progress.

Once I tracked my habits, I saw the discrepancy between where I thought I was spending my time and where I actually spent it. This awareness has led me to some amazing progress.

For anyone who is determined to ditch New Year’s resolutions this year, I suggest you start tracking your habits. It’s life changing, I promise.

How habit tracking works

All you need is a notebook, a pen, and a little dedication, because you’ll need to end each day by reviewing your habits. (If you’re the type who needs more structure than a hand-drawn grid, there are also apps, tools, and notebooks to help you track your habits.)

To start, make a grid.

Editor’s Note: Looking for a habit tracking template? Click here to download a free habit tracking worksheet, designed by Kate.

The graph paper we used in middle school math is useful so you don’t have to draw rows and columns. On one axis, write the habits you want to track, and on the other axis, number the days of the month. Since the first month or two is all about awareness, I suggest listing all the things you can think of that you spend your time doing: watching TV, going to Target, ordering pizza, exercising, scrolling through Facebook, working, etc. .

A note about tracking how much you work: If you work nine to five, I don’t think you need to track that because you know exactly how many hours you spend working weekly. However, if I stay up late or work at home in the evening, even if it’s only occasionally, I will track it. You may realize that you are spending more time than you think working outside of expected work hours. I’ll explain how to track this in the next section.

Every day you practice your habit, you get a check mark (I use an X).

You can track any habit you want — just make sure you have parameters around it. For example, if one of the habits you want to track is exercise, make sure you define what that means. Is half an hour of exercise the same as one hour for you? If not, then clarify it.

Personally, some of my habits look like this:

Yoga (this is an automatic one-hour class) Ten or more minutes of stillness < Forty-two minutes on my phone No TV No kids

If I do each one of these, I get an X. On a really good day, I’ll get about six or seven X’s out of the eight habits I track in any given month. And let me tell you, nothing is as gratifying as getting a full column of X’s.

Since I’ve been doing this for a few months, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m fully aware of what my habits look like, and now I’ve adjusted them so that I’m working on doing more of the things I do. Loyalty to me. That’s the great thing about habit tracking: it only takes a month to give you a good idea of ​​where you currently stand. By month two, you can start working on the things you aspire to, like spending less time on your phone, for example, which most of us can do.

I use an app called Moment that sends me alerts throughout the day about how much screen time I’ve used, including the total minutes I spend on my phone and how often I pick it up. The app has given me a goal of spending forty-two minutes or less on my phone a day, and that’s what I’m aiming for so far. If your phone use is something you eventually intend to reduce, using an app to determine how much time you spend on it overall will help you create more realistic reduction goals.

Think positive

Something that works great for me is phrasing habits so that the X is positive. In the example of working at home in the evening, this habit could be called “no evening work,” and you would give yourself an X for every day you left work at 5:00 and didn’t bother with it again until the next morning. Or, if the habit you want to track is how often you use single-use plastic, for example, the habit could be “no single-use plastic,” and for every day you go without using it, you get X.

Over the course of a month of habit tracking, you’ll build a great picture of what you’re spending your time doing, and all the X’s will be good work. You may even notice trends. When you do more of one thing, you also do more of something else, or vice versa. This awareness is key to making adjustments to your habits.

Change your habits

The key is not to try to change your habits right away, but to become aware of them first. It only takes a month or two of tracking until you understand exactly what your habits are. Once you become aware, you can make informed adjustments to your habits and include some resolutions for the new year.

Forbes contributor Brianna West suggests creating just a few goals. “Choosing less than a few goals for the new decade doesn’t mean you’re diluting your ambition,” she says. “In fact, quite the opposite. You focus very clearly on what you want to do, and direct your energy toward making a real and lasting impact.

I suggest adding just one or two new habits a month, just to make sure you can actually achieve them. Radically changing your life from top to bottom, while attractive, is not sustainable.

Habit tracking results

In the few months that I’ve been tracking my habits, I’ve already taken some big steps toward becoming the person I want to be. Besides adjusting my schedule so that I woke up at 5:00 every morning to write (habit tracking revealed that unless I made this adjustment, I was unlikely to spend any time writing), I was also spending much less time. On social media, which is an important habit for me. When I started tracking, I wrote “no social media” in the habits column; I wanted to see how many times I went without social media. The answer was never. Never, until I knew I’d get an X for the days I didn’t waste time scrolling through Instagram.

In my first month – a month I intended to use only for awareness, not progress – I actually modified my habit and went eleven days without social media. The days of social leave were not consecutive, but rather scattered throughout the month. I never thought I would go a third of the month without him. Turns out it’s easy! Not only that, it’s given me time to spend working on getting an X in my other habits. (In the second month, I went fifteen days without it. Tracking habits is really motivating.)

There is nothing more impressive than a person who is self-aware, and with awareness comes the ability to create goals that will not only stick, but will also make you a better version of yourself.

Once you get a good idea of ​​your current habits, you’ll be able to recalibrate and start working on creating better ones. If you’re not a big reader but aspire to be, maybe you’ll add twenty minutes of reading to your habits. Or maybe you’d like to try ten minutes of daily meditation. If you need some inspiration, here’s a great article on creating positive habits. Whatever habits you want to adopt, all you have to do is add them to your tracker and see how often you mark them with an X. It’s almost embarrassingly simple.

You may find that some habits will decline. I no longer keep track of the days I watch TV without my baby because they are so few and far between, and when those days happen, I consider them a gift. I also no longer track ten or more minutes of silence because every time I drive somewhere, my podcasts stop playing within the first ten minutes. It’s just become – wait for it – a habit.

There’s nothing more admirable than a person who is self-aware, and with awareness comes the ability to create goals that will not only stick, but will also make you a better version of yourself. It’s not arrogant to say that tracking habits has changed my life. I hope the same for you this year.

Collina Cicero is fascinated by stories – she reads them, writes them, gets lost in them. Other things she loves include yoga, traveling, taking cooking and Italian classes, and writing. Her first children’s book, Rosie and the Hobby Farm, was published in July 2020.