Tracking Daily Activities to Encourage Habit Formation

[c.k. lester]

I'm certain there are recurring tasks I can set up to help me track habit development. For example, let's say I want to get in the habit of drinking a glass of water every morning. I would make it recurring, and I would be able to check it off each morning as the activity is completed. The goal is to eventually make the activity a habit and, therefore, no longer need the reminder.

How would I organize that? Should I set up a folder for these activities, or maybe a context or ... what?

[Stéph]

I've previously set up recurring tasks for some habits I want to develop, like exercise. You could track it by making MLO keep a copy of completed tasks (an option somewhere in the set up for recurring tasks), but I don't find that particularly useful for checking how regular my habits get.

In the end, for time tracking and habit formation, I've started using a completely different app which is set up more specifically for such things - It's an iOS app called "ATracker Pro". I can view nice pie and bar charts to work out how much time I'm spending on my trumpet practice and sleep, for example, and I can export to a csv file for spreadsheets. There are loads of apps out there that do similar things, or ones that try to get you to gameify getting streaks of successfully doing whatever your habit is on consecutive days. I like ATracker because it doesn't follow a subscription model. Meanwhile, I keep MLO for planning and task management in home and work projects.

[zel...@gmail.com]

Create a folder, say   Habits

Create a subtask -   Habit template  and set basic recurrence values

When you want to add a new habit - right click and choose Duplicate Task(s)/Ctrl-D

Rename the habit, tweak the Task Properties

[c.k. lester]

Interesting. I've heard of habit tracking apps... I was just hoping
MLO did it for me and just as good! :-)

Thanks for the tip!

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[c.k. lester]

And then it will appear daily if I've completed it the prior day?

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[Michael Emerald, CFA]

Hi.

 

I did a similar thing by tracking how many accomplishments I did each day.  Then, each day I tried to up the previous days’ record.  Here’s how I did it:

1. For those tasks I want to record as accomplishments, I checked “completed copy”
2. I created a view for tasks completed in the last day
3. I filtered out anything that appeared in the view that I didn’t want appearing
4. I made a counter for that view

 

So if I drank water it showed 1 accomplishment.  Next day I might try that plus having a martini, makes 2.  Third day might be smoking a big fat bone before work, drinking water, then downing a martini (olive) makes 3.

 

HTH Have a good weekend

How would I organize that? Should I set up a folder for these activities, or maybe a context or .. what?

 

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[Stéph]

I like your style, Michael.

[Kini Man]

I just used the  ATracker Pro, thanks it's good app for Make up for the shortcomings of MLO

[Laurence Glazier]

I am doing this in an Evernote table, and the iPhone app "Routine". Will take a look at ATracker Pro, thanks.

[A. W.]

Interesting discussion :).

My persona conclusion in short - to this intent for getting M-L-O ;):

Recommencation - keep all within one system, keep your current tasks and history in separate files; do analysis with XLS based on exported stuff from the history

Precondition

• you have folders set up which model your "life" - i call this the "garden of my life"; most methods recommend something like 7-13 areas
• define with the folders sub-folders for the main stable things you want to have in your life - i.e. house, fitness, health, good relationship, ...
  • have no more than 2 layers.. deeper stuff i would defer to Mindmanager or similar as this is more tactical not MLO stuff

Implementation - tracking

• create repeating tasks for habits you want to form - frequency depending on the kind of habit
• in the recurrence advanced options disable the checkbox "do not create a completed copy of this taks on recurring"
  • by this you get a log of when you performed the habit
• do you thing with the task
• every morning archive all tasks starting from yesterday... or later into an archive.ml file

Implementation - analysis

• export all archive into an XLS file
• and start your analysis magic - by using a pivot-table to drill into the data as needed
  • by this you can create any sort of views on your past "performance" and get ideas across all areas of live
  • reason for this recommendation - habits typically either support or contradict themselves, but one can only "see" this if you take a look all areas at the same time and look for the balance

..

My journey ;)

I landed with MLO as having all strategic things in one system is kind of key.

i did start with XLS, the switched to mindmapping, then built my own access based application to even integrate the file-system and other resources and then simplified by to MLO.

As MLO has a really good master - based on observation of the software - who is using MLO for himself and that is perfectly observable.

For example the views and how they enable the slicing and dicing of "your life" is genius. And the dashboard - although the name is missleading  somehow ;) - is great too.

As you can for example define something for your idea as:

- top view all habits which are at hand for today

- bottom view - all related tasks which are derived or needed to perform the habit in a best possible way

- ... and so on

If you want to talk about the analysis part and what magic you can do with XLS to create great insights into your habit performance - happy to chat.

Most of the tracker apps have some sort of analysis means, but as soon as you want to leave the mainstream questions to your history you mostly end up lost in space ;)