Why You Should Be Tracking Your Habits (and How to Do It Well)
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Factors To Consider When Choosing a New Habit To Track
- Motivation: Choose a habit you personally care about. If you pick a habit out of a sense of obligation, your motivation will fade and continuation will be dependent on your already limited willpower.
- Regularity: find a habit you can track daily. Each habit repetition enforces it as a behavior and strengthens the pathways in your brain related to it. Eventually making the behavior automatic; a new habit.
- Achievability: choose something achievable so you’ll feel that if you put the effort you can do it. Better a tiny habit that you do every day than a huge one you hardly ever complete.
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Tackle One Behavior At a Time
You can’t fully focus on any behavior if you try to establish several at once. Doing so risks overloading your willpower and your habits may end up competing for priority.
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"Stack" Your Habits
The best way to turn a behavior into a habit is to use a trigger to remind yourself to do it. Your trigger needs to be something you always do anyway. Anything you already do without thinking works.
As you build new habits, you create new triggers for yourself and stack a new habit onto it. Each existing habit acts as a trigger to remind 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.
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Set a Schedule
To make your habits automatic faster, plan them into your day. Do them in the same way, in the same place, at the same time every day.
If you complete your new habit at any time, on any day, you won’t get the advantage of familiarity that helps you get used to doing that behavior without thinking about it.
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How To Keep Track
- Paper: if you use a diary or daily planner, make notes each day if you completed your habit or not. If you do a regular weekly or monthly review, this is a great time to check back through your notes to see how you’re progressing over time.
- Spreadsheet: you can set up a simple sheet to track if you complete your habit each day. This is a good way to make your tracking more visual so you can get an idea of a glance about how you’re going.
- Mobile Apps: these are convenient and you can access them anywhere.
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