Habit Change Journal

[Frida Kosofsky]

WhilstI love using the same layouts, sometimes it can get boring month to month to use the same layout. So spice things up a little! Sometimes it can be as simple as moving one element of the layout to the other side of the page, or changing the shapes you use within the layout. One particular favourite mixup of mine - changing the mood tracker to fit the theme! For example, the picture below shows my 2021 August theme which was stationery, and for the mood tracker I drew a pen pot and colour coded the pens according to my mood.

Now it's time to put it all together! You can decide where to place different elements, and how to incorporate your style into the spread. I like to gently sketch out a layout before committing to ink, it allows me to see different layouts and decide on the best one. Quite often if I like a layout I make a rough sketch with the dimensions at the back of my journal so I can have the dimensions at hand for when I next use it. Below are some pictures of how I lay out my habit tracker pages to give you some inspiration.

I journaled faithfully through my depressions, mania, and hypomania. I had at last learned to write about anything and everything that came to my mind. Eventually, the truth would come out. And it finally did, with the help of the fantastic staff in the psych ward at my hospital. They helped me to understand that I needed to leave my marriage in order to try to find happiness. I did end my marriage. But my journaling continued. It was something I looked forward to every evening before falling asleep.

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Once a year, I pull out some of my old notebooks, flip through the pages, and take a short walk down memory lane. I find this is a great way to see my life's overall trajectory and make sure I am moving in the direction of my goals. It also involves a nice mixture of nostalgia and the occasional "Oh, I should try this layout again!" But during my last flip through, I noticed an unfortunate pattern emerging in my habit tracking.

Each month, I was writing down a list of about eight items to track and to try to develop into habits. These were usually pretty general such as: no snooze button, read a book, drink 8 cups of water, exercise. The problem was that every one of my habit tracking spreads only had the first week or two filled in! After the burst of motivation at the beginning of the month wore off, I wasn't keeping up with the habits.

So why was I so bad at keeping up with my habits? Digging a little deeper, I discovered that every time I didn't follow through with a habit, there was an "event" that derailed the month. These were things like needing to stay up extra late to finish a work project or feeling sick. This would lead me to skip my daily habits, and once skipped they were often hard to start up again.

The problem was twofold: I didn't have a solid plan for completing the habits each day (when? where? how?). And because of that, I had to use a large amount of mental energy every day to decide what to do and to follow through with it. Inevitably, coming up with a habit plan daily was the first thing dropped when other life challenges got in the way.

At its core, my method for tracking habits is all about planning out as much as possible in advance. Knowing that my willpower ebbs and flows throughout the month, the goal is to minimize the amount of mental energy required to complete the habits each day.

I start by making a list of the habits that I want to track for the month. I try to tie these to long term goals I have set for the year, and it is normal for this list to change each month as habits solidify and priorities change. Recently, my focus has been on health, with habits such as working out, yoga, and meditation. I have found that my sweet spot is at around four to five habits. If I track more than that it starts becoming harder for me to keep up with them.

An important aspect of the habit list is including a short sentence or two about why each habit is important to me. The act of writing this out helps to set my intentions for the month, and I try to keep in mind a couple guiding thoughts:

Once I have decided on my habits and have grounded my intentions, I move on to designing a layout to track the habits. The exact format I use changes slightly from month to month, but the overall idea is consistent: a pre-planned and easy to fill-in visual representation of my habits.

At the center of the box I place a line where I plan out what type of workout to do each day. These are broad categories such as: Abs, Legs, Arms. If I complete the workout for the day, I write the duration underneath and highlight the date with a grey highlighter. If I miss a day of working out, the date gets highlighted in red.

The vertical bar on the right side of the box is my yoga tracker. If I complete my yoga practice, I fill it in with the length of the session and highlight the bar in grey. The small semi-circle at the top of the box gets filled in if I meditate, and the square in the bottom left gets highlighted blue if I reach my hydration goal.

Now for one of the most important parts of the method: coming up with a plan for how I will complete the habits. What can I plan in advance to make sure that on any particular day I have to make as few decisions as possible. For my habits, this means answering questions like:

The planning stage is also a chance to think about how the habits might be able to inter-connect and support each other. For example, if I exercise at 7am every day and tie drinking a glass of water to the end of my workout, I have already made progress on multiple habits. This idea of habit "stacking" or "anchoring" is discussed in more detail by James Clear ( -stacking) and BJ Fogg ( ).

Once the plan is set, it is time to do the work. Each day during the month I write some simple todos in my daily log to exercise, practice yoga, etc. Then when it is time to exercise I reference this tracker page to see what I scheduled for the day. I have found that since the tracker contains the "plan", I don't forget to flip back to it and I am better at filling it in every day.

The filling in of the tracker is definitely one of my favorite parts. This is when I get to break out my favorite highlighters and pens to mark the completion of the habits. It ends up being a lot of fun to fill in and the visual format helps draw me into completing my habits each day.

One of the aspects of this tracker that I find appealing is how flexible it is. Some months I don't have the time to make an intricate design, so I can fall back to a simple table representation of the habits. The workouts still get planned in advance, and I include columns for the same types of things I included in the box layout.

Or in months where I have more time, I can go all out and make more elaborate representations of my habits. Artistic designs are by no means essential for this form of habit tracking, but they can be a great outlet if making them is something you enjoy!

When building your journal-keeping habit, be specific about what you expect from yourself. At what time of day do you plan to write? For how long? Will your journal be in the form of lists or doodles or handwritten pages? Do you expect to record your thoughts every day, or once a week?

The Clear Habit Journal is a combination dot grid notebook, daily journal, and habit tracker. The design of the notebook came out of months of research that I did about what makes journals effective and what kinds of measurements and tracking are helpful for building habits.

So, with the help of Baronfig, I designed one. Baronfig is a New York City-based firm that makes high-quality, premium notebooks. The materials, build-quality, and design they bring to the process are second-to-none. With their help, we created something truly fantastic.

Easy index. A full index gives you two full spreads to log your content. The built-in page numbers make it easy to reference each section and write down the appropriate location in the index.

As the sun rose, I wrote and sipped my coffee. On cold mornings, I nestled into my fuzzy, dark blue blanket and propped the journal on a pillow in my lap. I wrote with my favorite pens (0.5 mm Pilot G-2s) in my favorite unlined journals (bought at the bookstore down the road).

By mid-March, things were going pretty well. Almost half of the posts I wrote that month were longer than three pages, and I barely noticed the effort. I grew to rely on my cup of coffee and half an hour of quiet time in the mornings.

At the end of March I was summoned to jury duty, and then selected for grand jury service, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, for a month. I lost several days on the new schedule, and then when I did write, it was a completely different routine.

In retrospect, I think shifting my routine to write at the dining table helped me keep my writing habit intact. But whenever I had the time to sit down in my usual spot on the couch, I ended up writing just as much as I did in March.

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