Habit Tracker

Let your habits become habits

Reading time: 5 min

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You realized that daily routines or micro habits can help you get organized, reduce stress and achieve your long-term goals?
And now you try to follow your habits but sometimes loose track?

Especially at the beginning you’ll want to keep track of your habits until a they truly develop into a routine.
Because you may have set your goals to daily

• read one page of a book

• learn 5 new vocabs of a new language

• practice an instrument for 10 minutes

• take 10.000 steps

But there are so many distractions in our modern world, that you sometimes may struggle to even reach those tiny goals.

So you want to keep track of your habits, to reach your goals.
Habit trackers are ideal tools that make this process easier by helping to track progress and maintain motivation.

In this article, I’ll show you the benefits of habit-trackers, how you can use them, and which tools are available.

What Are the Benefits of Habit Trackers?

1. Motivation: Tracking your progress makes you more motivated to continue. It feels great to tick off a habit or mark a day when you successfully followed through with a habit.

2. Awareness: Habit trackers increase awareness of your daily actions. At a glance, you can see how often and regularly you have performed certain habits, which is particularly satisfying when you can see that you’ve been jogging every morning for months.

3. Accountability and Discipline: Regularly tracking your progress makes you take responsibility for your goals. This helps maintain discipline and boosts your self-confidence.

4. Reflection: The collected data allows you to reflect on your progress and the effectiveness of your efforts. You can analyze what works well for you personally and where you might need to make changes.

What Are Habit Trackers?

Habit trackers are essentially checklists that you use to track your goals.
You can either use apps or physical calendars, whichever you prefer.

The goal is to have a visual representation of your progress.
This allows you to easily keep track and know exactly if you need to be more persistent.

You can just prepare a physical template as well and combine it with your journaling routine.

Habit Tracker in Notion

For the digital version of a habit tracker I highly recommend Notion.

I created this template to keep track of my habits.

By the end of the day, you can see what you’ve accomplished, which gives you a great feeling and motivates you to keep going.

With iOS18, Apple finally integrated reminders in the calendar app. You now can use those reminders for habit tracking as well.

iOS18 Reminders Integration

Use reminders along with your normal tasks and appointments to keep track of your habits.

Watch our YouTube video to learn more.

How to Use a Habit Tracker

1. Define Goals:
   Start by defining your goals. Make them clear and specific. What do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it? What habits do you want to establish?

2. Select Habits:
   Choose a few habits you want to track. It’s advisable not to track too many habits at once, especially in the beginning, as this could overwhelm you and make you lose motivation.

3. Regularity:
   Record your progress every day. This can be done by making an entry in your calendar or by filling out a predefined template. It’s easy to do both analog and digitally.

   Use a journal and create a template for the coming week with the weekdays in the first column and each habit with a checkbox in the following columns. This way, you can check off the corresponding habits every day.

4. Analyze:
   Regularly review your progress. Analyze how well you are achieving your goals and what adjustments might be necessary.

5. Rewards:
   Set small rewards for reaching milestones. This can provide additional motivation.

What Should You Consider?

Habit trackers are effective when you keep the following in mind:

1. Consistency:
   It’s crucial to use your habits regularly to get the effect you want. Only if your habits become routines, you will get the full potential.
   Therefore, tracking your habits regularly and consistently is essential as well.

2. Clear and Realistic Goals:
   It may take some time for you to identify which habits can help you reach your goals.
   But beforehand it is even more important to define those goals you want to reach.
   Visualize what you want to achieve and imagine specific and realistic steps to get there.

3. Motivation and Discipline:
   Intrinsic motivation to change or establish habits is helpful.
   As I mentioned in my article about daily routines, you should do it because it makes you feel good. Because it takes discipline to keep going. The more emotionally you are involved, the better.

4. Reflection and Adjustment:
   You should regularly reflect on your habits. Is the effort well invested? Does this habit feel good? Will you get the results you expect with the specific habit?
   If you feel, that it doesn’t make sense to stick with a habit, adjust it.

Conclusion

Habit trackers are valuable tools for promoting and maintaining new habits. They provide motivation, awareness, accountability, and enable you to reflect on your progress.

When used correctly, habit trackers can significantly help reduce stress and achieve personal and professional goals more efficiently.

Now about you.

What do you think about habit trackers? Do you already use them? How do you keep track of your habits?

Leave me a comment to your thoughts about habit trackers.

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