I admit I am a huge fan of habits, metrics, and all kinds of tracking systems. I read dozens of books on this topic, listened to numerous podcasts, and even took some courses.
Over the years, I have been trying to optimize my habit tracking and experimented with several systems. A few years ago, I tried “yearly tracking” of various habits (I wrote about it here).
This all worked great until I became a father of two beautiful girls. At that point, I realized that I started to struggle with following my habits. I simply did not have enough energy to do my routines properly. I lacked motivation.
It was then that I decided to try to optimize every day instead of tracking habits yearly. What if I could meditate for 5 minutes every day, eat a piece of fruit every day, and take a 10-minute walk?
Fast-forward to today, I have built a system in which I track various habits on a daily basis. Most of them take very little time to complete, except a few “bigger” ones, like going to the gym (which occurs three times per week in most cases).
The best part is that I can measure my daily “success” by calculating the number of habits I execute. This is essentially my daily score.
Preview of my micro-habits tracking
At one point, I realized that it would be beneficial for me to also have “negative” points for things like drinking alcohol, eating unhealthy food, and a few others. These add negative points to my day, forming the final score. One more benefit here is that whenever I tick off my habit, a small dose of dopamine is released, which is a pleasant feeling!
In addition to the tracking sheet, I made a graph to see how my days are going visually:
Daily score over a period of time: blue line is daily score, while the red line is the “average”.
Seeing my score over a period of time allows me to become better aware of my behavioral patterns. For example, these “drops” in score usually occur on the weekend when I allow myself some freedom in eating, take a few drinks with friends, and skip some other stuff I do on regular days.
One other example is if I am going to a wedding, I will likely not have time to make some of my positive habits and will do negative ones (alcohol, sweets, unhealthy food). And that’s OK! For me, it’s important to see that, in the long run, I am on the right track.
I am not trying to do all my “positive” habits daily. Instead, I am trying to do as much as I can, and this approach has changed how I view my life. Earlier, I was more of a perfectionist —all or nothing. That didn’t serve me well. Now, I am focused on what I can do for myself every day, within the limits of the specific day.
Some of the habits I am tracking are:
- Meditation
- Going to gym
- Eating low-carb meal
- Reading
- Taking a walk
- Eating a fish
- Eating one piece of vegetable
- Drinking cocoa
- Taking suplements
- Morning stretching
To conclude, this approach of having micro-habits, mini daily actions that can be done very quickly (excluding gym and meditation), has helped me become more consistent in my journey of self-improvement, and so far, I love it!
