Little Habit Tracker That Could

Cultivating and Maintaining the Habits That Enrich Your Life

Anyone my age or older probably remembers the cereal commercials that would advertise Lucky Charms (for instance) as “part of a balanced breakfast.” If you dug a little to figure out what they meant by “balanced breakfast” you would see that it was

• Eggs

• Bacon

• Toast

• Milk

• Orange juice

• A grapefruit

And then a bowl of Lucky Charms as some kind of gruesome breakfast dessert. “Since you’re already eating 2500 calories at breakfast,” mused the 1980s-era General Mills ad exec, “then what’s a bowl of Lucky Charms into the deal?” Whatever. Now it’s 40 years later and I can eat Lucky Charms three meals a day if I want because I’m an adult and nobody can make me eat a grapefruit. 

Anyway, I’m always looking to improve my mental health situation. It’s not great in the best of times and global pandemic plus election year is not the best of anyone’s times. As part of my balanced mental health breakfast, which includes medication and therapy, I also do journaling. 

Let me be perfectly clear about this article and its purpose so that there is no confusion: This article is about cultivating habits. I’ll describe a technique that I picked up from journaling but this is not a journaling article. You don’t need to be into journaling, or have a journal, to do this. All you need is a pen and a Post-It. Honestly, you won’t even need those.

Getting On Track

I decided I wanted to build some good habits into my routine to improve my mental health situation. And I decided I would stay on top of this process by tracking it in my journal. Again, though this is a journaling technique, you can totally do this on a sticky note, on the back of an envelope, in Excel, or anywhere you feel comfortable.

This will work equally well for any set of habits you want to build. Do you want to make sure you’re practicing regular self care? Want to build strong writing habits? Trying to be diligent about promoting your business on social media? This habit tracker will help with your goal of building those habits by motivating you to do them and reminding you about them every day.

When I started looking for habit trackers to copy, I noticed that most of them were for a single habit. Let’s say I want to read at least a little bit every day (which I do). There’s a billion trackers out there that will track my reading habit for a week, for a month, for a year. But let’s say I also want to write every day. Now I have two trackers to deal with. Too complicated and too much work. I am not prepared to develop a tracker to track my habit trackers. That’s a fathom too deep down the meta-journaling rabbithole for me.

What I wanted to do was keep track of all the habits that I was trying to build in one place in a very straightforward and simple way so I wouldn’t burn up all my creative energy just trying to draw the trackers each week.

Pick Five Things

I needed to narrow down the habits I was going to track. There’s dozens of things I want to do on a regular basis that would be good for me, but I settled on five. Five is a manageable number of things to regularly build into my day, as long as I don’t make any of them herculean.

I suggest five, but a different number might work for you. I would only caution you not to pick more than five to start with, because if you try to cram too much into each day and can’t reliably succeed then you may get discouraged.

Make It a Mix

In making a list of the habits that were priorities for me and then sorting them to pick my top five, I found that most of them were falling two categories: 

1. Productive

2. Enjoyable

Not to say that enjoyable activities can’t be productive or vice versa. They definitely can be and most of the self-care habits I came up with are. For example, reading. Most people would consider reading an enjoyable activity. For me, it’s an actual bugaboo right now and I’m having a hard time getting myself to do it. 

I used to be an avid, 100-book-a-year reader. Now I feel accomplished if I tackle one book a month. To put some helpful pressure on myself, I started some book clubs. With a purpose and a deadline, reading is a productive activity for me right now. I enjoy it when I do it, but doing it makes me feel like I built momentum toward an objective. In addition to reading, here are some more ideas to consider for a productive habits to build:

• Write 

• Exercise 

• Promote your business

• Do your skincare routine

• Get up on time 

How about something that is just enjoyable? Another item on my habit tracker is “social.” I waver between calling myself an ambivert and an extrovert but I’m certain that I’m not an introvert. I work from an office in my home and with most of my social outlets shut down for COVID, I was not getting enough social activity to keep my spirits up. One of the habits I’ve been working on is to engage socially with someone outside of my immediate household each day. That could be a video call, a phone conversation, or even a lengthy text exchange over SMS, Facebook, or Discord. 

My daily social commitment is enjoyable and important for my mental health, but I don’t think of it as productive—and that’s fine. Getting away from feeling like everything I devote time to needs to be productive is also very beneficial for my mental health. Here are some more ideas for enjoyable habits to build:

• Get enough sleep

• Drink water 

• Meditate or practice yoga

• Play a video game

• Spend time outdoors

And don’t forget that the absence of an action can count as a positive habit, too—for example:

• No unbudgeted spending

• No Starbucks

• No alcohol

Give Yourself a Gimme 

As one of, or in addition to, your enjoyable and productive habits, I suggest you pick a “gimme.” This is an item that is super easy to check off—one that you’re pretty likely to do every day even without pushing yourself. For me that’s “social” but some other good ones could be:

• Brush your teeth

• Shower

• Say an affirmation

The idea with the gimme is that if you’re having a rough day and you aren’t getting to any or all the things you want to do, you have a pin that you can knock down quickly to check something off. For instance, if I’m really slammed with work and other obligations and not getting to my habits, I can call up a friend or family member for a quick 15-minute conversation and check “social” off on my tracker and then I can feel that my day wasn’t a total loss. 

I find that if I have just enough motivation for my gimme habit, crossing it off it can give me enough of a boost to tackle another one—which occasionally has the potential to snowball into a productive day when I least expect it.

Anyway, pick your five, whatever they are. My five are: read; write; journal; shower; social. Trying to make a habit of promoting your business every day? Maybe your five are: Facebook; Twitter; Insta; LinkedIn; YouTube.

Define Success

Whatever habits you choose, make sure you define the success condition for each. For example, reading: What would a successful reading event look like for me? Would I need to read for at least 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour? Read at least one chapter? Read at least 10 pages, 25 pages, 50 pages? Make sure you know what it takes to put an X in the tracker for the day. When I began, I set the bar low and decided a successful day’s reading was at least 15 solid minutes spent reading something that was not on the web. 

When putting together your success conditions, be mindful of the overall time commitment you’re making. Don’t pick five different things to which you want to devote an hour every day unless you reasonably have five hours a day to put toward these things.

Draw Your Tracker

Now you just have to draw the tracker itself. You can make this as simple or as ornate as you want, and you can track for any length of time. I’ll share the tracker I use most often—a tiny, rectangular grid that anybody can work up in a flash—and then some ideas for variations in case you want a challenge.

Original Weekly Rectangle

Draw a grid of 48 squares: 8 columns across and 6 rows down (or 1 row for each habit you picked, plus 1 extra). It can be as big or small as you want; just make sure your column width and row height are approximately equal and big enough to accommodate one character in your handwriting. Mine is around 1.5 inches tall and a little less than 2 inches wide—small enough to fit on a standard Post-It. Label your column heads with the first letter of each day of the week (you can start with Monday, Sunday, or any day you want. It doesn’t matter.) I start my journal week on Monday, so mine says:

M T W T F S S

Label your rows with the first letter of each of your five things. As I mentioned above, mine are Read, Write, Journal, Shower, Social: 

R W J S S

You’ve got a grid of 35 enticing empty boxes just waiting to be filled with your favorite accomplishment sigil. You could do an X or a check mark, or you could shade the box with a pattern or color it in with a pencil or marker. Here’s an example of the finished product:

That’s it, that’s the tracker. I even added a little drop shadow to dress it up for you because it was too simple. Bet you think I drew this on a Post-It as evidence that you do not need a journal to do this activity—but you’re losing that bet. It’s actually a Highland Brand Sticky Note™. 

Here’s the same thing I made in Excel in less than a minute:

And here’s the Excel one again, but modified for social media goals:

Wherever you’ve drawn your tracker, keep it handy. Each day, as you accomplish one of your habits, check it off. You might not get to everything each day. I’ve never had a week where I checked all 35 boxes. I feel pretty good at the end of the week if more than half the boxes are checked. If you checked fewer than half the boxes, then you have a goal to try to beat for next week. 

If this tracker works well for you, like it does for me, you’ll be seeing a lot of it. I like the simplicity. I’ve tried doing more ornate/illustrative stuff in my journal but I don’t always have the energy or inspiration and frankly I’m not very good at drawing. Most weeks I stick with the tiny rectangle grid. But if you want to mix it up, I’ve drawn some variations to share with you. It doesn’t always have to be a rectangle and it doesn’t have to be limited to a week at a time. 

Pie-Slice Weekly

I used a Helix Angle and Circle Maker to create this one. Please be kind—Catherine from Shelf Life failed high school geometry. Draw a circle, then add 6 more arcs at even intervals. Divide the pie into 7 narrow slices by drawing 8 lines at about a 13- or 14-degree interval. The pie-slice tracker would fit nicely in a page corner. This particular pie slice is drawn on the back of an envelope that came from my Realtor, hi Ryan!

Square Monthly

I drew this on the back of a discarded sheet from my black-paper sketchbook. The other side has a terrible drawing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and some inexplicable tear stains. This tracker is deceptively easy to draw if you have patience. It’s just a 1-inch square in the center and then about fifty thousand straight lines. You can put anything you want in the center square but I drew a cat so I could have an excuse to have my cat-oriented friends check out Shelf Life.

If you are reading today because I told you I drew your cat, here she or he is. That is 100% your cat.

Round Monthly

I got my Helix Angle and Circle Maker back out for the big finale. This one I drew in my Actual Journal™ for the month of October. I’m adding an additional layer of data by filling the boxes according to how I feel about tackling the task instead of just with an X. Feel free to contact me through my website at the end of October if you are interested in seeing how it looks colored in (as long as you promise not to judge my consistency).

As you can extrapolate from the hand-drawn examples herein, nothing in my journal looks nice. None of my angles are plumb, my handwriting isn’t neat or even consistent, I smudge ink all over the place, and I make at least one mistake in every single thing I try. So to anyone who may be thinking about journaling but doesn’t know if they’re good enough at using a pen and ruler—definitely try it. I’m confident that literally anyone can do it neater and nicer than I can.

TL;DR: Take the joy of ticking a box and put it to work forming better habits for you.

Coming up on Thursday, something that every writer needs to think about: How to identify the audience for your work. Do you know who they are? Whatever you’re creating, I bet I can name at least one huge fan of your product. Subscribe so you don’t miss it, and I’ll talk to you soon.

PS—Ever wanted to try something like NaNoWriMo but felt your project wasn’t a good fit? Wishing you could participate in a writing community challenge in November but not up for the pressure of NaNoWriMo Official? The Shelf Life Discord is hosting a NaNo Club for anyone who wants to participate in a November writing challenge in any capacity, for any type of writing project. Want to write poems? Songs? Blog posts? Short stories? A non-novel long-form book? Choose your project and then set your own goals, mile markers, and schedule. We would love to have you. 

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