Our habits play a powerful role in the quality of our lives. Improving daily habits can have a significant impact. As they say, though, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Enter the habit tracker.
A habit tracker is a simple written or digital device where you can easily keep track of your consistency in maintaining the daily habits you’re trying to foster. You may have a sense, for example, that you exercised a bit more this month than last month—a seeming improvement. But our vague recollections can be unreliable. If you track the days you exercise, you’ll know precisely whether you’re improving or not and to what degree, and you’ll know what it will take to improve further going forward.
The act of tracking one’s progress is only the beginning of the advantages to maintaining a habit tracker. Looking at a list of habits you wish to practice each day can be a helpful reminder of what you should be doing, especially when life gets busy or distracting. If you catch yourself mindlessly scrolling on your phone, for example, a glance at your habit tracker can quickly remind you of the things you should be doing and pull you away from wasting your precious time.
A habit tracker can act as a motivating tool that encourages you to keep up your streak or minimize your gaps in consistency. It can be very satisfying to mark off the successful adherence to a habit you’re fostering each day. Over the long term, from week to week and month to month, you create a visual model of your progress.
The data you get from your habit tracker over time can show you the overall areas of your life that need further improvement and also the great impact consistency brings when you do particularly well. Failure to track our habits can lead to vague notions about how well you are or aren’t living up to your own expectations of yourself. A habit tracker shows you precisely where you’re succeeding and where more focus or a different strategy might be needed.
You can find digital apps that will track your habits or print predestined habit trackers online, but it’s just as easy to make your own. In a notebook, across the top of a page, number each day of the month. In the left-most column running down the page, list the daily habits you’d like to track. Keep these habits small, doable, and specific. For example, instead of “work out,” you might say “lift weights for at least 15 minutes.” You might be hesitant to consider a small amount of exercise in a day to be “working out,” since that’s rather vague. But you’ll clearly know whether or not you lifted weights for at least 15 minutes.
Keeping a habit tracker even encourages you to expand your repertoire of positive habits. When you’ve mastered the habits you’re tracking, you can begin to stack new habits on top of them, further improving your life.
Habit tracking is a simple way to make incremental improvements to your life that compound as time goes on. The important categories of our lives—our fitness, our relationships, our careers, and our spiritual understandings—rely on consistent focus each day over time. The more diligent we are in maintaining our good habits, the better each aspect of life becomes.
