Habit Tracker Game

[Otilia Mojarro]

Eliteperformers will often measure, quantify, and track their progress in various ways. Each little measurement provides feedback. It offers a signal of whether they are making progress or need to change course.

Habit formation is a long race. It often takes time for the desired results to appear. And while you are waiting for the long-term rewards of your efforts to accumulate, you need a reason to stick with it in the short-term. You need some immediate feedback that shows you are on the right path.

The most basic format is to get a calendar and cross off each day you stick with your routine. For example, if you meditate on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, each of those dates gets an X. As time rolls by, the calendar becomes a record of your habit streak.

Placing an X on each day is the classic look. I prefer something a little more design-oriented, so I shade in the cells on my habit tracker. You could also use checkmarks or fill your habit tracker with dots.

The most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path. In this way, habit tracking can have an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire.

First, manual tracking should be limited to your most important habits. It is better to consistently track one habit than to sporadically track ten. I tend to keep my habit tracker simple and limit it to my three or four most important habits.

Sure, a perfectly filled-in habit tracker looks beautiful and you should strive to achieve it whenever possible. But life is messy. In the long run, what matters is that you find a way to get back on track.

A habit is a lifestyle to be lived, not a finish line to be crossed. You are looking to make small, sustainable changes you can stick with for years. And a habit tracker is one tool in your toolbox on the road to behavior change. It is an effective way to visualize your progress and motivate you to show up again tomorrow.

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James Clear writes about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. The book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 60 languages.

I just completed ready a book on habits, and as a regular asana user, I want to create a habit tracker within asana, I know how to create a recurring task, is there any way to review my task history weather I missed the task on last Friday or completed the task last Friday, (Idea is to create a calendar which shows the task is completed or not on a past given day.

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!

Did this get completed? I am finishing up a similar tracker and am struggling with Quickchart (yes, I have watched your video from 2021 already). Hoping if this is finished that you could add to the VIP app. Thanks!

I've seen advertising for apps that habit-track, but have never felt the need. A quick Google search gave me 255M hits for 'how can I track my habits' so you should be able to find some inspiration out there. I do keep a daily 'diary' note which I'm now using to leave myself reminders for future jobs and record what significant events filled my day - useful for remembering when updates happened, or new software got added forinstance. That's a separate notebook and one note per day. Evernote has (I believe) some suitable diary and date templates if you need them - but I don't think we got recurring tasks yet....

Thanks! Right, I know Google has plenty of results, but I was only really looking for Evernote-exclusive inspiration from its users. I'll look into those templates; I'm sure they're useful. I appreciate your reply.

I've thought about just using a note with a table in Evernote (similar to my time with the spreadsheet), but I've never actually tried it. But it makes sense since I'm in Evernote all day. I'd be curious what others might already do in Evernote as well.

For anyone who remains curious about habit tracking in Evernote, I've curated a pre-made template and tweaked it to suit daily task management. It is very simple, but it works for me. Thanks for the inspiration @Boot17.

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