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Why Tracking Your Habits Will Make You More Productive, Consistent And Successful
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Stop Lying Yourself
People tend to let themselves off the hook and take the easy way out much more often than they realize. Often, we hold on to an image or identity that we have of ourselves and let that image distort our reality.
When you track yourself you have factual evidence of your slip-ups, making you less likely to mindlessly justify them or pretend they didn’t happen.
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Being Productive Through Tracking
When you don’t track your habits you’re more likely to talk yourself out of certain activities when you don’t feel like doing them. Tracking reminds and confronts you with your failures, effectively punishing you.
Tracking also gamefies your habits, providing extra motivation to being consistent. That sets a chain reaction of benefits in motion that starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Effectively Tracking Habits
- You can use tracking apps, sheets or a journal to track your behavior.
- Decide which habits you want to track.
- Decide on a timeframe for tracking.
- Set a target for how many times you want to successfully follow each habit in your chosen timeframe.
- Decide on which days you want to do which habits, or even schedule it in your calendar.
- Mark successful and unsuccessful habit executions.
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Success Rate
A success rate gives you a number that informs your performance analysis. You will shortly be able to see if you’ve improved or not.
Calculate your ‘success rate’ to measure your progress over time. The formula is: Success Rate = (Completed Amount / Target Amount) * 100%.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Tailor your to-do lists
Use the 1-3-5 rule when putting together her daily to-do list.
On any give...Build good habits in two minutes
The “two-minute rule” has two parts.
First, if something takes less than two minutes, do it now. Next, start building new habits for two minutes at a time. The rule for this is: When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. The idea is to make your habits as easy to start as possible.
Think of these “two-minute habits” as gateway habits that will lead to your overarching goal.
Complete tasks in batches
It takes time to get into a rhythm to work on a task. Instead of constantly starting and stopping that process, it’s better to keep your rhythm going by bundling similar tasks together.
By doing this, you avoid interruptions and prevents himself from procrastinating.
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Habits You Should Track
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 wil...
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.
“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.
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Tsundoku
Many of us have a desire to read. We buy books, but then the demands of work and family catch up with us, and we never get round to reading the books. The Japanese calls it tsundoku
Finding the time for books
To give books the attention and time it deserves in your life, you need to make it a higher priority. It means you have to change your habits and routines to allow more reading.
Sometimes, your reading needs only a little encouragement to displace something that should be lower down on your list. For example, to forgo watching television and reading a book instead.
The reading habit: Succeeding long-term
- First consider why you want to read more books. Reading should be enjoyable for you because you find them entertaining, calming, stimulating, and fascinating. Once the habit is set, you can also read other things you "should" read.
- Change your surroundings to make it easier for you to grab a book. Reading apps can be prominent on your phone. Physical books should be in places that you most often frequent.
- Create modest reading goals. Permit yourself to start with reading one page a day. Once the habit is established, you can increase it.
- Once you have laid the foundation for your new reading habit, create an action association, such as reading on the train to work or with your mid-morning coffee or dinner.