I have just completed a year of habit tracking. For 365 days, I’ve tracked, analyzed, and reflected upon all the things I do day after day. It only took one month of tracking for me to realize the discrepancy between what I thought I spent my time doing and what I really do. A year later, I’m happy to report that the results in my habit journal are significantly more satisfying than they were when I started out. I also feel better about some of my lofty goals, as I began spending more time working toward them once I realized how infrequently I actually had been before.
What is habit tracking?
It’s exactly like it sounds: keeping track of the things you do every day, which, whether you like it or not, are considered your habits. The way I do it is simple. At the beginning of each month I write out all of the habits I want to track. I do this in a habit journal but you could easily make your own. Some habits I have monitored all year include writing, reading, and yoga. Month to month, my list of habits changes a little bit, but my most valued habits (i.e. the ones I want to make sure I make time for) are constant.
With my habits on one axis, I write out the days of the month on the other axis, like this:
Each night before I go to bed, I go through my list and put an X next to the habits I did that day. Then, at the end of each month, I tally up the number of days I did my habits, which gives me concrete evidence of how I actually spend my time. Tracking is not only motivating — progress is one of the greatest motivators after all — but it’s enlightening because once you become aware of your habits, you can then make adjustments and work toward spending your days the way you want to. (For a more thorough how-to on habit tracking, see this piece.)
Why track your habits
I used to think I wrote often. But after just one month of tracking my habits I found out that I wrote a whole lot less than I thought I did. The same went for yoga. If you would have asked me how many times per week I did yoga, I would have said 3–4. After tracking it, I came to understand that most weeks I only did yoga a couple of times; some weeks not at all.
This is why I track my habits — awareness is the catalyst to great change. Only once I learned how infrequently I did the things that mattered to me, or the things I thought mattered but my schedule reflected otherwise, was I able to adjust my priorities and make room for what’s important to me.
The awareness I gained after the first couple of months of tracking was great, but it didn’t feel good. As someone who is triggered by reminders of passing time — Facebook memories showing me a photo from five years ago that felt like five months ago, my children growing out of clothes before they even wear them — I am obsessed with how I spend my time. I try to fill it with things I want to or need to do, and little else, but my results showed me that I needed to make some big changes to reflect that desire.
What to do with awareness
After assessing my results, I made adjustments to my habits immediately. I changed up my priorities, started creating space for the things I wanted to put an X by, and stopped doing some of the things that didn’t earn me an X and therefore weren’t important to me. Tracking my habits for just a couple of months brought me enough awareness to make big changes.
I used to watch television on occasion. Not often, but sometimes you could find me on the couch watching Netflix and scrolling through Instagram. Not anymore. Now, if I have child-free downtime, I will spend it on any number of habits I want more Xs by, like working on my novel or taking a walk. I do this because these things are important to me. I do this because in five years, I want to look back and see that I worked every single day toward the things I truly value.
Some habits I have tracked this past year are:
Not eating meat (to track things you don’t want to do in a way such that you stay motivated, write it out so you get an X when you do the thing you want to do. In this example, the thing I wanted to do was not eat meat)
10+ minutes stillness
Writing
Yoga
Reading
Doing a kind gesture
Book marketing
Walking
Journaling
Not buying coffee
Hip flexor stretches
No social media
No dining out
No sweets
It’s about more than reaching your goals
Becoming clear on, and ultimately recalibrating, your habits has importance beyond simply filling up your life with the things that matter to you. Consider this: An article on the interplay between stress and habits reveals that, when stressed, we subconsciously default to our habitual patterns. So:
“A person who normally eats well and exercises is likely to stick to those healthy habits during times of stress.”
Knowing this, and knowing how stressful life can sometimes be, wouldn’t you want your habits to be the kinds of things your body and brain default to when overcome with stress? It comforts me to know that the next time I’m stressed, I will subconsciously be drawn to doing the things I care about enough to have made my habits.
Annie Dillard famously said in her book The Writer’s Life, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I don’t know about you, but I want to spend my life doing the things that fulfill me and contribute to my goals. And I plan to do that by tracking my habits in perpetuity.
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