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When you first set up new habits it is so easy to fall off the wagon. The first few days will usually go well, but as soon as you miss a day you very easily slide and after a week or even two you realise you haven’t kept up with your new habit at all. There is a very easy way to combat this. It’s called habit tracking.
You need to find a way to keep your new habit top of your mind. You can do this in a variety of ways.
Get a habit tracker app
Set up a daily diary reminder on your phone
Have an accountability buddy
Old school – create a habit tracker on you fridge or in your paper diary / bullet journal
Get a habit tracker app
If you can’t live without your phone and like apps, there are tons of habit tracker apps out there. You can either search through the App Store or Google Play Store to see what’s out there. Most of them are free and pretty much all of them are easy to set up. If you like recommendations, simply do a Google search “best habit tracker apps” and see what authority websites such as LifeHack recommend.
Set up a daily reminder on your phone
If you’re not into apps, you can simply set up a daily recurring reminder on your phone. Let’s say you want to remind yourself to take your vitamins after breakfast every day. Create a diary entry with an alarm for the time you eat your breakfast and it will go off with a notification and not let you forget. For habits like taking vitamins it also helps to leave them out in plain sight where you prepare your meals. This is an additional visual trigger for your habit.
Have an accountability buddy
Do you have a friend who also wants to create a daily habit? Message each other every day and check in with each other. “Have you done it yet? Why not? Do it now!“
If you don’t have anyone to support you with this, there are plenty of Facebook groups you can join that are set up to support each other with creating good habits.
Create a habit tracker on paper
If you’re old school, create a habit tracker on paper. You can either stick it on the fridge or create a weekly or monthly tracker in your paper diary or bullet journal. This is my way of doing things. I use my bullet journal daily and constantly look at my weekly layout to check events and tasks so a weekly tracker works best for me. I used to use a monthly tracker to start with but found that I don’t often go to the page at the beginning of the month, so I didn’t get reminded often enough. As I pretty much live on my weekly page, it works much better for me to have it there.
Here are two examples of layouts I have played with.
Again, an online search will show you lots of different options. Try Pinterest or Google images.
What’s the point of habit tracking?
The point of tracking your habits is to keep them top of mind until you have become used to doing it daily and you don’t have to think about it anymore. You can then move onto creating another habit. I recommend you don’t try to build more than one new habit at a time to set yourself up for success. Why? That’s a topic for another blog post. 😉
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