Paper Doll Helps You Find Your Ideal Analog Habit Tracker
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
~ Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin)
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. ~ Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin) Click To TweetTHE BENEFITS OF HABIT TRACKING
Over the past two weeks, in Organize Your Annual Review and Mindset Blueprint for 2023 and Paper Doll’s 23 Ideas for a More Organized & Productive 2023, we touched on the importance of building good habits, either in and of themselves or to replace deleterious ones. We talked about the wisdom of James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.
Clear’s best-seller, which should be read in its entirety, talks about how successfully tiny habits (at the metaphorically microscopic, atomic, level) are based in four laws of habit creation:
- Make it obvious
- Make it attractive
- Make it easy
- Make it satisfying
In chapter 16 of the book, Clear references the essential nature of habit tracking, and ties habit tracking to the above four laws, but I’d like to speak directly to the last one. He states, “One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.” Well, duh!
And how can we verify our progress? Well, often, we can measure it by looking at the end result. If we’re trying to lose weight, we can measure our progress in having to tighten our belts or buy smaller clothes. If your kids are making progress toward doing better in school, improved grades will eventually make it obvious.
But it takes time to see that kind of progress, and if we’re going to keep motivated, to stick with our habits, we’re going to need to be satisfied daily. We need to see a sign of progress, no matter how minuscule, often. That’s where habit tracking comes in.
Habit tracking gives us an immediate sense of progress, even if the progress is only in our willingness to make an effort.
Persistence is the measurement of your belief in yourself. ~ Brian Tracy
Persistence is the measurement of your belief in yourself. ~ Brian Tracy Click To TweetTHE DRAWBACKS OF HABIT TRACKING
I should note that there are some inherent drawbacks to tracking our habits.
Our intention is to draw our attention to what we’re doing so that we can strengthen our resolve and recognize our struggles so that we may overcome them.
However, it’s easy to become so focused on our string of achievements that we become obsessed. When that happens, any time we do end the streak has the potential to demoralize us and weaken our resolve to get back on the horse.
If you tell yourself that you will run every day, but the weather is so stormy that “it’s not fit outside for man nor beast,” you may see your options as two-fold and rigid: risk life and limb and frostbite to hit your goal and mark that X or dot on your tracker, or leave it blank. That’s black and white thinking.
And if you leave it blank, you may feel like you’ve already lost. Somewhere, in the back of your head, despondency sets in, and failure to achieve your goal on one day can make you feel like a failure overeall, uninspired to get back to your habit the next day.
But this is an unnecessary dichotomy. Our habit goals are just that, goals. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
If you can’t run three miles today, could you sprint up and down the stairs in your house, or work out along with a walking or dancing video?
If you miss your 10,000 steps and only manage 7500, could you do 500 extra steps for the next 5 days (or 250 for the next 10, or …)?
Maybe you promised yourself you’d practice the piano for 30 minutes a day, but your work and childcare schedule made that impossible; could you just play some scales to stay limber, or play one song to boost your spirits and remind yourself why this is a goal habit in the first place?
My colleague Karen Sprinkle created a wonderful 48-Week Achievement Guide, an e-book explaining how to use her patented chart for logging progress on goals. She recognized the inherent loss of momentum that comes from not getting to check off a day or week of a habit.
Thus, Karen’s chart creates space for four FREE weeks, weeks in which you have a “get out of jail free” card to not achieve your goals, while not exactly wrecking your streak, either.
Maria White interviewed Karen for episode #13 of her Enuff with the Stuff podcast, entitled Finally Accomplish Goals Using the 48-Week Achievement Guide. Take a listen.
DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN: THE BASIC CONCEPT
One of the best known tales of habit tracking comes from Jerry Seinfeld, master of his own (habit tracking) domain. Once asked how he wrote so many jokes, he explained that early in his career, he made a commitment to himself to write one joke a day.
Just one joke. But one joke every day.
He didn’t tell himself he had to have a Tonight Show monologue. He didn’t push himself to write a sitcom script. He just had to write one joke each day.
Seinfeld had a large wall calendar in his apartment, which showed all the dates in the year. Each time he wrote a joke, he marked the calendar with a red X, and as the story goes, he eventually had a long chain of red X’s to create a visual cue to show how he’d been consistently putting in the effort.
Did he need talent? Of course. Comedic timing? Without question. But Seinfeld’s advice to young comedians was simple: Don’t break the chain!
The chain of red X’s on the calendar is just the simplest form of habit tracking.
AUTOMATED HABIT TRACKERS
The easiest (though not necessarily the best) kind of habit tracker is one that is automatic, or done for you by something or someone else.
I recently bought a new scale, and realized that it had a Bluetooth function. I didn’t really need a scale with Bluetooth, but I was intrigued to find that once I connected it to the iPhone app (which itself connects to the Fitbit app), my scale tells the app not only my weight, but also my BMI, metabolic age, the percentage of my body made up by water and of skeletal muscles, my bone mass and muscle mass, and all the percentages of my fat that is body fat, subcutaneous fat, and visceral fat. And I hope that’s the last time I ever use the word “fat” in this blog!
My point is that all I have to do is to step on the scale (which I do only once per week so as not to obsess) and the app and the magic of Bluetooth does all the rest.
Similarly, while I can (and admittedly do) look at my Fitbit tracker on my wrist, the app takes care of tracking my efforts. Here’s how I did this past week.
Note: while I didn’t make my 10K goal steps on Tuesday last week, I made up for it the next day. I didn’t get down on myself for it, because I knew that progress, not perfection, is key to building habits.
There are even “smart” water bottles that measure and communicate (again, by Bluetooth) with an app to track how much you’ve hydrated!
There are a few main benefits of an automated habit tracker:
- You don’t have to do any math. (Yes, I can add daily numbers to get weekly ones, but why should I have to?)
- Automated trackers require little effort, so you can concentrate on your behaviors without focusing on the mechanism for measuring them.
- You don’t have to worry that you will forget to consistently measure and track your habits.
Parents and teachers commonly track and report the success of children at achieving habits, from potty training to turning in homework to practicing vocabulary words. If you work in a call center, there’s software to measure your metrics: how many calls you took, how many ended in resolved problems, etc.
The key problem with automated habit tracking is that by completely off-loading the labor of tracking, there can be a disconnect between effort and how much you pay attention to your habits. This is why, although there are many excellent habit tracking apps, I recommend that clients start their habit tracking journey with proactive analog methods.
CONCEPTS TO CONSIDER WHEN SELECTING A HABIT TRACKING METHOD
As you’ve heard me say before, with regard to calendaring and note-taking, the determination of whether you should go analog or digital, or which method within either category you choose, depends more on your self-knowledge than what’s popular.
If you love apps and prefer to gamify your habits, a habit tracking app may be your best bet, even if I would personally argue against it. If you have an artistic bent and find color motivating, selecting an analog habit tracker that lets you use colorful markers or crayons to track your progress might be the key to your inspiration.
Consider the following:
- Delight — How much do you enjoy a particular method of tracking your habits? Do you get joy or a sense of calm when you stop to log or mark your progress because the colors please you or the app makes a delightful sound?
- Convenience — How easily accessible is your method of tracking your habit? Does your tracking method need to be portable? If it’s just a card in your wallet or an app on your phone, it may not make a difference, but if you want to have a beautiful tracker, you’ll need to have drawing implements with you or wait until you’re wherever they are. Will that delay impact the likelihood that you’ll track what you do? Will you be less likely to perform the habit if your tracking method isn’t always visible?
- Flexibility — Do you want to customize your tracker or just follow whatever already exists? For the same reasons that I find bullet journals stressful (too many options, too many reminders that I’m not artistic), I’d prefer an analog system that has practically no customization, but wouldn’t mind getting to plunk around with digital settings to change colors and graphs or charts in an app.
- Measurement style — Do raw numbers have meaning to you, or do you need to see a bar chart? (And do you care whether your charts are vertical or horizontal?) Does a particular measurement style affect how much attention you’ll pay to your tracking? The attention you pay will surely have an impact on how much you improve.
- Commitment and accountability — The nature of the habit tracking method you choose can increase (or decrease) how committed you are to tracking, and thus to the habit you are building. Does this method make you feel more committed? Does it make you feel accountable to it?
We manage what we monitor. ~ Gretchen Rubin
The more you embrace your habit tracking method, the more closely (in a healthy way) you will monitor it. And we are more likely to tweak and improve and, in the words of Gretchen Rubin, manage what we monitor.
We manage what we monitor. ~ Gretchen Rubin Click To TweetANALOG HABIT TRACKERS
There are a variety of analog habit tracking methods, from — yes, as Seinfeld did — making X’s on a blank calendar to buying or making your own cute trackers. The following are just a few suggestions so you can consider what you might like to try.
Adhesive Habit Trackers
Tiny adhesive habit tracker sticky notes have the advantage of fitting anywhere. If you use a paper planner (and if you need ideas about that, see Paper Doll’s Guide to Picking the Right Paper Planner), sticking your tracker on your current weekly page or even on the front of your planner will keep it — and your goals — front and center.
I’m a huge fan of almost anything in the 3M Noted by Post-it® line. I found the following in my local Target last year; the periwinkle shade drew me to it.
I haven’t been able to find this 2.9″ x 4″ Noted by Post-it® Habit Tracker at Amazon, but they are available at Target online and in stores. Online, 3M only mentions the pink version, for which they only have this tiny photo; the difference seems to be the “Make it a habit” label instead of the “Take (self) care” title.
The very-cool mäkēslife goal-setting/stationery store has a minimalist, $5 habit tracker sticky notepad. Because it only indicates the days of the week and has six lines for habits on each note, you can either track multiple habits each week, or one habit for six weeks (or two habits for three… you get the idea). The 60-sheet pad measures 3.25″ x 2.125″.
Adhesive habit trackers are quick and easy to grab, so they’re low-effort. Setting one up takes seconds, and checking a box or circle is no more effort than an X on the calendar. But only you know whether effort on the low end of the continuum will keep you motivated. Do you need more involvement to embrace the habit of tracking a habit?
Habit Tracker Printables
On various sites, you’ll find both free and for-purchase habit trackers. On Etsy, for example, a search of “Habit Tracker Printable” yields hundreds of choices, from the simple to complex.
This streamlined, downloadable Monthly Habit Tracker from MyLifePlans on Etsy comes in two styles, one with boxes and one with circles, and is just $1.74:
My colleague Katherine Macy of Organized to Excel references her own (free) downloadable, printable habit tracker in the post Practical Tips for Living Your Best Life: The Smallest Achievable Step.
©2022 Organized to Excel
Another fun option is from Cristina at Saturday Gift. Cristina has created free downloadable, printable spiral habit trackers in 28-, 30- and 31-day styles, as well as a variety of mini-trackers, trackers designed to be used in bullet journals, and more.
Printables are ideal for someone who prefers something that takes up a little more real estate and is less likely to get lost. You’re limited by the designer’s creation, though, so if you’re the type of person who needs a lot of customization, printables don’t offer much wiggle room for your muse.
Printables can also seem like homework. For an Obliger or Upholder (in Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies parlance), this is a plus. If you’re a Rebel or Questioner, however, printables may work less for accountability and feel more like an (unwanted) obligation. Know thyself!
Habit Tracker Cards
Not everyone wants a sticky note or a full-size printable. Some people just want a tiny note they can tuck in their wallet or use as a bookmark, but keep handy.
Baron Fig has a series of 3″ x 5″ Strategist Index Cards in three styles: Dot Grid and To-Do, each $10/pack of 100 and Habit Tracker cards for $15/pack of 20. All have rounded corners. (The Dot Grid and To-Do cards are blank on the back; the Habit Tracker cards have motivating quotes on the reverse.)
Fancy Plans takes the popular spiral style of habit tracking to the card form in their 3″ x 3″ Linen Textured Habit Tracker Journal Cards. ($7.99 for a six-card set.)
These square, spiral habit trackers are tiny and designed to be clipped into your journal/planner pages. Each tracks up to eight habits for an entire month.
Unlike more traditional index-style cards, these are smaller, and if you weren’t great at coloring inside the lines in kindergarten, the teeny-tiny boxes might outweigh the visually appealing nature of the spiral. Fear not; we’ll be looking at a similar but more expansive option a few sections down.
At Home With Quita’s YouTube channel has a great video on how to use these. Scroll to about nine minutes in when the coloring begins.
Of course, you could make your own DIY habit tracker card if you had the patience (and a straight edge, pencil, and stack of dollar-store index cards).
I liked the minimalist combination of “Don’t Break the Chain,” DIY, and cards (if not actual card stock) illustrated in this video from the Robert’s Theory YouTube channel. I also thought the white/silver ink on the black background had a nifty visual appeal.
Habit Tracker Journals
As with printables, you will have an embarrassment of riches from which to choose when you search for habit trackers journals.
Baron Fig has created a Clear Habit Journal in collaboration with James Clear. The clothbound, hardcover, rounded-cornered, open-flat notebook features habit trackers, one-line-per-day journaling space, and lots of Clear-specific content. It comes in two sizes: Flagship (medium size at 5.4″ X 7.7″ and 224 pages) or Plus (large size, 7″ X 10″ and 208 pages). It’s $26.
However, if you want a journal that you could place on display to clock your habit tracking as the day goes by, there are a variety of styles, from gridded notebooks to artistic visions.
This Lamar Habit Tracker Calendar in the spiral style is undated, spiral-bound, and stands-up on its own, or you can hang it or lay it flat. It’s $16.95. You can track weekly and monthly habits.
If you’d like something a little more subdued, Weanos has a Habit Tracker Journal in a similar format, but with Kraft coloring, for $14.99.
And you can explore the internet (or even just Amazon) for a wide variety of other habit tracker journals.
DIY Your Bullet Journals for Habit Tracking
All of the prior options give you pre-ordained structure for tracking your habits. Personally, I don’t want to fiddle with lots of customization; it takes away from the time I would prefer to spend on my habits rather than on creating a system for tracking my habits. I’m willing to trade the beautiful and creative (admittedly, because my artistic leanings are neither beautiful nor creative) for having all the boxes be the same size and not having to worry about my chicken-scratch handwriting.
However, if you like the idea of having a notebook with you in which to track your habits, and if you want to embrace customization in terms of style and color, a bullet journal or other blank journal might be ideal for you.
The internet is full of options for formatting. You may want to start with this short list, all with mind-blowing graphics for tracking your habits:
50 Habit Tracker Ideas for Bullet Journals (Bullet Journal Addict)
25 Bullet Journal Habit Tracker Layout Ideas to Help You Build Better Habits (Habits Buzz)
121 Habit Tracker Ideas for Your Bullet Journal (Planning Mindfully)
45+ Bullet Journal Habit Tracker Ideas & Examples for 2023 (Develop Good Habits)
10 Habit Tracker Spreads (Bullet Journal Habit video)
Intentional Habit Tracking (Bullet Journal)
In addition to design ideas, and especially helpful for those of us who aren’t so artistic but might like to explore habit tracking with a bullet journal, there are two tools that I find delightful.
Stickers
Sometimes, flashing back to third grade is just what you need to get a boost of motivation. (Though sadly, I suspect it’ll be hard to find any scratch & sniff habit tracking stickers.)
Stickers are fun, colorful, and add pep to paper. When I visited Italy and the UK, I bought a variety of stickers for use in my paper planners. Stickers for tracking habits would be equally motivating.
Just Google “habit tracker stickers” and you’ll find a nifty bounty of colorful options.
The Grey Palette‘s Habit Tracker sticker sheets in cool or warm hues offer up 4.5″ x 6.5″ stickers (32/pack for $5.25) for tracking Sunday to Saturday habits and habit-specific stickers.
Mochi Things has a huge variety of color-dot stickers, calendar stickers, and grownup activity stickers made from PVC material and generally priced under $5 for a set. If you’d rather use dots than markers, the Circle Pigment See-Through Stickers might fit the bill (and prevent marker bleed-through in journals).
Rubber Stamp Blocks
If your fear of creating wiggly lines and lopsided grids in a bullet journal or DIY habit tracker is keeping you from embracing the format, rubber stamp blocks may be the secret shortcut.
I found a large number of calendar/planner/habit tracker rubber stamp blocks on Amazon, Etsy, and around the internet, but they all seem to follow the same patterns, so I encourage you to find a price and style that appeals to your aesthetic.
This Tosnail 18-Piece Bullet Journal Stamp Kit creates all the stencil/formats you need for bullet journaling, including dated and undated tracking grids, as well as formats for just listing the days of the week, as well as stamps for calendaring, list-making, meal-planning, and more.
Although I’m a Paper Doll, I know there are a variety of digital habit tracking solutions, from simple spreadsheet-based grids to cool Evernote habit tracker templates to apps galore. We’ll explore digital habit tracking in the near future.
Until then, how do you track your habits? Please share in the comments.
Paper Doll Post:
Wow, so many options!
I think for someone like me, an analog tracker works best. I really enjoy the process of logging my activity. Checking off boxes and adding dots is my idea of fun.
However, for those who don’t enjoy “disciplin-y” kinds of tasks, I think the automatic ones agreat.
That spiral one is downright sexy – especially with all the colors. Makes me want to start a new habit just to put it out on display!
So many, and yet I was just scratching the surface in trying to point out the different categories.
And yes, that spiral version has become the most popular style in recent years. it definitely requires good fine motor coordination to get the smallest cells filled in, but it makes me want to invest in a new set of brush-style markers. Usually, I avoid anything fiddly, but the spiral versions are very cool, and anything cool but fool-proof is motivating!
I currently use an app for habit tracking, but I use it more like a printed journal.
Oooh, I’d love to hear more. Which app, and does it give you a report? How is it more like a journal?
Thanks for reading!
It’s called Grid Diary and you can set up your own grid templates with whatever fields or questions you want. I set mine up with a box foe each area of my life and every day I record anything I did that gave me pleasure or satisfaction.
Oooh, I will definitely check out Grid Diary. It sounds intriguing.
There aren’t reports, but you can display and filter information, so if I want to see (for example) when I practiced music, I can.
Julie:
I went into an internet deep dive a couple years back trying to find various habit trackers and what I found didn’t come remotely close to what you have here. My hats off to you for this amazing blogpost!
Hi, Joeseph! Thanks for reading the post, and I really appreciate your kind words. I tend to write incredibly long posts with the hope that people will enjoy this kind of deep dive. Thank you again for making me feel like the effort was worth it. You made my day!
As Seana said, sooo many options! I am working on consistently achieving 10,000 steps a day. I know I walk many more than 10,000 steps but I do not have a smart watch and I don’t always have a pocket in which to stash my phone. I’m thinking about the oura ring.. to help me track steps and more.
I love the idea of the water bottle which helps track how much water you drink and the scale which syncs to your other devices.
Checking off boxes doesn’t appeal to me however, I keep a running list in a notebook and scratch off the things I’m working on as I complete them. If I don’t get something done, I move it to the next page in the notebook to help me remember.
An Oura ring seems like a nifty (if much pricier) option. I like that my current (sub-$100) Fitbit is a slimline option, as I am not comfortable wearing a bulky watch like an Apple Watch. When I originally got it, I’d also separately the “skins” they make to wear the Fitbit clipped to the waist or bosom as I’d done with my previous Fitbit. I find it’s useful for times when I am going to a more formal event and don’t want to miss out on counting the day’s steps (or dance steps!).
I understand what you’re saying about checking off boxes, and your approach makes sense for tasks and events, though a running list may not make sense for habits one wants to stick to that feel/seem far removed from a work list, like “getting to bed by X o’clock” or “eating three vegetables/day.” I suspect most of us will want a combination of different methods for tracking habits.
I am grooving on all of the analog options you shared, Julie! The makeslife sticky note tracker is very cool- simple, easy entry, and flexible. And who knew they made “smart” water bottles? Amazing! I know about the “smart” scale because we purchased one recently. My husband and I like to joke about it. The scale consistently shows our weight, but it’s temperamental with showing the other metrics. It’s humorous, really. It’s supposed to help you track things automatically, but there are days when it doesn’t feel like it. Sound familiar?
While analog tracking is enticing, for me, my habit tracking is done digitally. I use a variety of tracking methods for the different areas of focus. One of the most effective tools is my 2Do app. I set a daily repeat for the habit I want to pursue, like walking or meditating daily. When I do it and check it off, it automatically sets a new cue for the next day. And even though I’m not physically drawing a “red x” or coloring in a box, when I mark the electronic box, the app draws an animated line through the item, gets marked “done,” and disappears from my list. It’s satisfying, and I get that slight endorphin ping too.
The bottomline is use what works- analog, digital, or an accountability partner. Developing new habits takes work and commitment. So whatever methods support change, go for those.
Thank you for the enlightening post.
I completely get what you’re saying, Linda. The biggest annoyance with my scale is that the app requires my phone to be nearby for the Bluetooth to work. I generally don’t have my phone in the bathroom, which is where I weigh myself, meaning I have to remember to bring the phone to the general vicinity of the scale to ensure they communicate. However, I don’t want my phone in the bathroom, where there’s water and a non-carpeted floor, so then I have to take it out of the bathroom again before I can shower. It’s not perfect, but I do like the idea of knowing how much my bones weigh. 😉
Thanks for reading, and you’re right — whatever helps us keep our commitments to ourselves is the best option!
You’ve really found an option for each type of style people may have. Thanks as always for such great research and recommendations.
Thank you for your kind words, Janet, and for reading Paper Doll!
First of all, your posts are always meaty and chock-full of goodies. Thanks for covering all the bases, Julie.?
And, second, it’s fantastic that there are so many options to track (and build) solid habits. There’s a flavor for just about anyone. Mine, of course, is digital. “Look, Ma! No math skills required!” LOL ?
LOL, Deb, I’d expect no less from my digital-everything friend! Thank you for your kind praise!