Habit tracker
Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
―Mahatma Gandhi
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: Ongoing
🥣 Ingredients: Sheets of paper, 1 pen, books “The power of habit” by Charles Duhig, “Predictably irrational” by Dan Ariely, and “Atomic habits: an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones” by James Clear (if you’re curious to find out more about them!)
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Accomplishments, Liberatory Learning
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Accountability, Autonomy, Determination, Feedback, Flourishing, Liberation, Planning, Self-directed learning
Habit tracker
📝 Description
Building a habit to track habits.
In the 1950s, American cosmetic surgeon Maxwell Maltz began noticing a pattern among his patients. When he performed an operation (e.g. nose jobs, breast augmentations, scar removals, etc.), he found that it would take the patient about 21 days to get used to their new appearance. In the preface of his book, Psycho Cybernetics, he writes, “It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery, it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated the ‘phantom limb’ persists for about 21 days. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to ‘seem like home’. These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.”
Unfortunately, even though Dr Maltz mentioned that it requires a minimum of about 21 days, many people have come to believe that it only takes 21 days to form or break a habit. Actually, a recent study shows that it takes a longer time to make/break a habit (up to 66 days on average). The time frame depends widely on the behaviour, the person, and the circumstances. But the best news of all is that it is an absolute that every one of us can form a habit. Habits are the algorithms that operate in the background but that in reality, power our lives. For instance, good habits help us reach our goals more effectively and efficiently. Bad habits, on the other hand, either make our goal harder to achieve or prevent us from achieving it entirely. Take a look at your goals at work and in life in general: what are new habits that might serve you? And what are bad habits you would like to break free from?
The following recipe shares a few tips to build a habit tracker to measure and track your progress. More than anything, it provides feedback. It offers a signal of whether you are making progress or need to change course. This recipe has been gifted by our wellbeing content partner Nadya Saib of Wangsa Jelita and has been influenced by the following books:
- The power of habit by Charles Duhigg;
- Predictably irrational by Dan Ariely; and
- Atomic habits: an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones by James Clear.
If you are not aware of what your habits are, we first invite you to try out our recipe “The habits scorecard” and then return to this one.
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Create the template (10’)
Download and print this template or draw your own based on the image. To do this, you need to take a sheet of paper and turn it landscape-wise. Divide it in half. In the left section, write “habits” at the top whereas in the right section, write “week no.” and leave a blank space for you to fill in the number of the week you are tracking. Then in the left section, draw a bullet point list (anything from 3 to 6 is fine) whereas in the right section, draw a table with the days of the week for each of the bullet points. This is the template that you can use time and time again, so make sure to make copies of it before you start filling it out (if you drew your own!).
Step 2 – Define and track habits (10’)
In the left section, write the habits that you want to “make” or “break”. One habit per bullet point. Try to be concise but as clear and specific as possible. This will help you keep focused and not overwhelmed. Now all you must do is cross off the days in which you have practiced the new habit or avoided the old one.
Step 3 – Cope with setbacks
As you go along tracking your habits, you might expect to experience some drawbacks. To deal with this you can, first and foremost, focus on the most important habits. Avoid overcommitting because usually, most people feel sluggish when they have too many habits to track. Second, do not fuss too much when your habit streak ends at some point. When it happens, think about it like when you brush your teeth. There was a day (okay, more than one, be honest) when you missed brushing your teeth before going to sleep. But that didn’t stop you from brushing your teeth entirely, did it? The same with forming habits. When you miss a day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible. Third, if it is the tracking part that you struggle with, remember that it’s completely normal. You are experiencing what I call habit-ception, i.e. the habit of tracking a habit! The advice is to track a habit immediately after you accomplish it (even if you don’t have your habit tracker with you; you can write it down elsewhere and then record it).
Step 4 – Review habits
Once you feel more confident in making a habit, you may add more items to the list. And when you feel you no longer need to track it, stop tracking it. You know best when you may stop tracking a habit. Just remember that there is no need to force yourself to master a habit within a particular period, let alone judge yourself in the process. Enjoy the journey. If necessary, reward yourself with something for a particular streak you have completed. Design a system that works for you and that motivates you to keep going.