On Habit Trackers

XXXIX

2024.03.24

We’ll be discussing not only about how I finally forced myself to commit to a habit tracker, but everything else I’ve done before that point to hold myself accountable to growth.

Habit Tracking

My room back home is a graveyard of habit trackers; their corpses are scattered about among the books and trinkets. In the drives across my numerous google accounts, there are even more neglected spreadsheets that once held the promise of keeping track of my daily actions.

However, I’m now at a personal record for tracking my habits; I’ve been going since December 31st, 2023. There have been one or two days where I’ve missed and backfilled the tracker for the day before, but, otherwise, I’ve been quite timely with it. Believe it or not, “Habit Stacking” actually helped me finally stay committed to the practice—more on that below.

First, though, I’ve admittedly made a lot of progress in regards to personal growth without a habit tracker tracker in the past. So, what are the other tools for self improvement that seem to work?

Renouncement

I’ve made a now long standing commitment to myself about a bad habit I would never engage in again under any circumstances. The exact commitment is not appropriate to explicitly spell out here; many of you probably already know what it is, and if you don’t, you’re more than welcome to ask me what I’m talking about. 

That being said, the general idea here is that you can grow a lot by simply not doing something. If you have some massive energy sucking activity or habit, you don’t need a functioning habit tracker to break that habit. You can just simply force yourself to stop by making it an absolute law or maxim: I WILL NOT DO {Insert thing you will not do}.

A good word for this is Renouncement. Some others I’ve played around with are Severe Austerities and Abstinence, but Renouncement best captures the extreme nature of the act–you are declaring to yourself that some action is no longer an option for you. Days are counted as a measure of temporal distance from the renouncement; collecting more days on a counter is not the goal, it is a side effect.

I’ve taken this one overboard at different times and have found myself living like a monk, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I would encourage you to use Renouncements judiciously; it’s hard to just dump every single vice all of a sudden, but maybe that’s what you need. 

For me, I was able to identify one thing that contributed to most of my other problems, so I stopped it cold turkey. Doing so was difficult, but sustainable. I’m not sure how sustainable it would have been if I cut out five major questionable behaviors all at once.

However, even cutting out this one bad habit out so absolutely made it pretty trivial for me to pick a month or two and say “I’m not drinking,” or to go hard core keto for a month, or do any other sort of sprint of discipline. And even though those sort of short form absolutes have an expiration date and therefore aren’t treated with the same gravity as the Renouncement, I find that those, in combination with the Renouncement, still help put me on the right track. Given a general growing sense of discipline met with interspersed month or multi month periods of sobriety, I went from drinking nearly every night freshmen year of college to now drinking maybe six times in the last five months, only for two of which my BAC exceeded .08, and not by much.

Do What You Love

While the opposite of forcing yourself to not do something is forcing yourself to do something, there’s something else in between: leaning into doing what you’re already passionate about and is also good for you. What positive or high leverage behavior do you already like doing that you can just do more of?

For me, one of those things was journaling. I love writing, it’s easily one of my favorite hobbies. 

Since I was 15 or 16, I had been journaling on and off. When I was maybe 19, I started picking my frequency up and spending more time reflecting on who I was and who I wanted to be. About when I turned 20, in conjunction with my aforementioned Renouncement, I started journaling even more. And, sometime in 2021, it just happened that I found myself journaling nearly every day. I take journals with me wherever I go. 

Since this isn’t a “habit” in a tracker, there is no pressure if one day I don’t journal, but it very rarely feels like a chore. I just naturally leaned into something that makes me understand myself more and be more mindful without applying much mental pressure to force myself. For me, it’s both fun and a great way to emotionally regulate myself.

I’d have to go back and check, but in 2022, 23, and so far in 24, I probably journaled something like 95% of days, if not more. 

And there you have it, a healthy habit that doesn’t feel like a healthy habit.

To Do Lists

Separate from the journal, I carry around little notebooks that I keep track of tasks both big and small in. It also serves as a micro journal and notepad for when I’m away from the big boy.  

This isn’t really a habit tracker per se, but when I’ve been trying to do tasks for a week straight or every few days for a week, this works pretty well as a way to make sure I don’t forget them. If I want to comment on LinkedIn posts every three days, maybe I’ll put it in the to do list for three days from now with an arrow next to it so I remember to extend it out. 

Again, not really a habit tracker, but I thought I’d throw it in here as another tool to make it easier to do the things I’ve committed to doing.

Habit Stacking

Enter the habit tracker, this thing that, for the last few years, has been the bane of my existence. A week here, maybe half a month there, three days there. Taped to bathroom mirrors, left on my dresser, found in a spreadsheet that auto opens when I turn on my mac. No matter how hard I tried to make it inescapable, I would still escape it.

Like a mouse finding his way through a maze to the cheese, something in me refused to comply.

If you’ve read or even parsed James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, you’re familiar with the term Habit Stacking, this idea that if you already have a habit, you can just add more habits by putting them next to existing ones. 

So, I made my struggle to commit to a habit tracker easier by putting it in the back of my journal. Now, every night, when I am journaling before bed, I take stock of what I’ve done throughout the day in a habit tracker. And, now that I know I’m not going to escape it, I’m doing a much better job of committing to the habits contained within each and every day. 

In sales or product design, a great heuristic is that you increase your likelihood of getting the user to take the desired action by making it as easy as possible for them to do so. If that’s the case, why not do the same thing with yourself and your own behaviors?

Habit Tracker Stats

I plan on going into the actual contents of my habit tracker next week, but there is an observation about it that I want to share this week. As I wrote in my last post about feeling out of it about a month ago now, I realized that a habit tracker was good, but it didn’t feel like it meant anything until I started tallying sums on it across bigger time periods. 

It’s set up in my journal as one page per month. While there is some feel for the the wall of habits getting more full over time, it’s hard to get that under two conditions present in my habit tracker: 1) the whole thing is non continuous–I can’t drag my eyes down from January to March in one go, I have to switch pages; 2) some of my measures are quantitative, such as how many minutes I spent doing an activity on day. Unless I started filling a percentage of the box, I wouldn’t visually be able to recognize it, and, even then, how would I account for going over my goal?

So, the solution was beginning to tally things on a weekly and monthly basis. As an example, in February, I read for 520 minutes, not counting audio books. That count feels more trackable and countable than a wall of numbers and checks; increasing that counter gives me an objective rather than the monotonous one of doing the thing every day. 

You have to be able to do the thing every day, but you’re doing it because you know it will add up to having done everything that the person you want to be has done. It gives you a better idea of where you’re outperforming (so you can make the goals more aggressive if appropriate) or underperforming (so you can focus on improving). 

If you’re new here, why don’t you make it a habit to read these posts weekly by subscribing below?

I don’t like the idea of thinking that you need some optimal solution to outperform your past self.

At the same time, though, all that matters is what you do, so what you have to do to get to those actions is irrelevant, as long as you don’t come to depend on them to take the action.

We’re looking for accelerants, not dependencies.

Live Deeply,