My First Week Using a Habit Tracker

The time I felt most productive and energetic in my life was when I had a strict morning routine. Back then, I was able to build up my habits due to a few reasons:

Using habit stacking and choosing easy habits after watching the video How to become 37.78 times better at anything | Atomic Habits summary (by James Clear)
My classes started at the same time every day, so I had a consistent wake-up time

Ever since that term, I've never been able to stick to my habits, and establish a consistent bedtime and wake-up time.

Staring my habit tracker

After reading about the habit tracker system proposed by Petr Ludwig in his book The End of Procrastination, I decided to give it a try. I built the habit tracker into my digital planner Planda, and started tracking my habits.

I started with these habits:

Brush teeth by 9:30pm
- The later it is at night, the less self-control I have. Because of this, I wanted to make sure I brushed my teeth before I became more susceptible to procrastination
Shower by 10:30pm
- By separating the overall goal of going to bed early into smaller habits, I hoped it would make it easier to achieve
Drink 3 cups of water midday
10 sit ups
Fill out habit tracker (as recommended in the book)

These habits seem easy, and that's why I chose them. The book says that if you feel adversion to a habit, you should make it easier. It also suggests that you raise the bar after 20 successes in a row.

Day 1-2 of committing to the tracker (Nov 4-5):

Riding on the novelty of trying something new, I successfully completed all my habits. It felt great! However, since my habit tracker didn't include a specific bedtime, I went to bed quite late even though I was ready for bed a lot earlier.

Day 3: Fail

This was not a good day for my habit tracker. Due to unavoidable circumstances, I simply cannot brush my teeth by 9:30pm and shower by 10:30pm on Wednesday nights. Despite that, I should have completed the other parts of my habit tracker, but instead I forgot.

Realizing how bad I was at remembering things, I added a few safeguards. I set my laptop to go into night mode at 9pm, as a reminder to brush my teeth. I also set Apple's downtime feature to start at 10pm, as a reminder to shower.

Day 4: Fail

I was out the entire day, and got home late. I'll have to come up with a strategy for days like this.

Day 5-7: Improving

I added a few more habits to my tracker:

10 kicks/leg
Start work by 9am
- I didn't want to set bedtime as a habit, since until recently, my family would shut the wifi off at night, so I'd only be able to check off my habit tracker in the morning
Apply for 1 job

Areas for improvement

I need to set a specific bedtime, and put it into the habit tracker
- I've so far been unable to keep my habit for starting work by 9am. This is because it's so easy to push back my bedtime when it's late and I have less self-control and discipline.
On days I cannot complete all my habits by the time speficied, I should set a specific, achievable alternative time. This way my groggy and tired brain can simply follow a laid out plan instead of having to think about what to do.
I need to set a weekly review session to see what I can do to increase my chances of completing my habits.
- I realized this through writing this blog post. Instead of working hard to remember all my habits, I need to work smart in order to make them achievable and memorable.

I started seeing more successes now that I've gotten more used to completing these habits daily.

As I collect more data, I hope to unlock more insights about my habits, and what affects my ability to keep them. I'd like to look at things such as day of the week, and how my habits affect each other. I'd also like to build habit stacking into the system.

Looking for a habit tracker? Create a Planda account planda.ca to use my habit tracker for free!