In the modern world, laziness and procrastination can become serious obstacles to development and achievement. To avoid blocking their path to success, many people prefer to fight these phenomena. One of the tools in this fight is a good habit tracker.
What it is, how checkmarks in the calendar help to train willpower and get the laziest parts of the body off the couch - read the LC Work article.
A habit tracker is a calendar, spreadsheet, or application in which the user fixes a goal and notes the regularity of working on it. For example, they decide to start running in the morning. To do this, start the tracker and mark with a plus sign, tick or color every day when you really did the exercises. This makes it easier to track goals and accomplishments. It is assumed that this approach will help to make a regularly repeated action a habit.
It gives an instant stimulus that pushes a person to activity again and again and teaches self-control with minimal effort. After all, the necessary action eventually becomes commonplace. Depending on your goals, you can choose a monthly habit tracker, 100 days, or even a year if it's a difficult achievement. For short-term, periodic goals, or some kind of test that will help you understand if it works at all or not, you can use a habit tracker for a week or two.
What habits can be formed in this way:
There are several factors that contribute to the formation of habits with the help of a tracker.
To form a habit, with or without the help of a habit tracker, three components are needed: a trigger (or initial stimulus), an action pattern, and a reward. Bad habits fit perfectly into this scheme:
Trigger - wake up |
Action Pattern - Perform a Coffee Brewing Ritual |
Reward - to enjoy the consumption of the product, its taste, a feeling of cheerfulness |
Good habits are usually more difficult to develop. In the example of refusal of informational noise before going to bed, it looks like this:
Trigger - approaching bedtime |
Action Pattern - put down your phone or other sources of information and engage in more calming activities |
Reward - no annoying or disturbing news, calmness, easier falling asleep, sleep alignment |
However, the problem is that dopamine, as part of the brain's reward system, pushes us towards simple and quick pleasures. And longer-term results - healthy sleep, achieving career heights, a toned body, excellent knowledge of a foreign language - seem too inaccessible and attract much less. Therefore, there is a high risk of losing motivation and abandoning all positive undertakings.
And just habit tracking can become a substitute for such immediate pleasure because putting pluses in front of completed goals is very nice. This activity also leads to dopamine production, increasing motivation and desire to continue positive actions.
On those days when it seems to a person that they are doing nothing, and all their efforts lead to nothing, they can simply look at the completed calendar and make sure that they have done a lot and many small goals have combined into a quite tangible result. In addition, filled squares or circles encourage you to continue in the same spirit - so that the chain of achievements is not interrupted by a single empty cell.
If the weekly habit tracker is always in sight, then its use will not forget to drink a glass of water, read their daily page norm, or do sports exercises. When the calendar fills up every day, then, in addition to the main habit, another habit is formed - to keep a tracker.
Trackers can be paper or digital. Their choice depends on the preferences of the owner: someone likes to look at the lined sheets on the wall, and someone likes to fill out cards on a smartphone.
The simplest paper tracker for a month is a regular monthly calendar. You can buy any and mark it with an icon or color every day when you did exercises or spent a day without sweets.
The tracker will help you correctly plan training or other activities if it includes different actions. For example, if you need to carry out different types of physical exercises on different days or combine them in different combinations. And so that even the tracker itself pleases the eye and cheers up, you can choose some inspiring design.
If the goal of the user is to learn how to stand in the bar for half an hour, this will require a lot of effort and time. In this case, a plank habit tracker for a month is suitable.
When the goal is difficult to achieve and monthly progress is difficult to track, it is worth setting yourself up for an annual challenge. It, in particular, can be taken by those who want to eradicate a bad habit.
Paper trackers can be of different shapes. There are the usual rectangular, round, or in form of objects. So, those who control the amount of water they drink per day start a water habit tracker, in which they make marks inside the bottles. And if they want to drink more water, they paint over the painted bottles.
“We use up water while we sleep. By morning, our internal reservoir is depleted. We need to replenish it. In fact, the first meal of the day should be water. A liter of water is a healthy way to start your morning. And if we add a pinch of unrefined crystalline salt, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and a spoonful of freshly squeezed lemon juice to it, we will have an excellent springboard that will prepare our digestion, saturate us with water and start the release of necessary substances for detoxification,” says Darin Oljen, a world-recognized expert in the field of nutrition and healthy lifestyle.
Such trackers are more convenient than conventional universal calendars or simple tables with a list of habits. Each of them contains a separate goal, so it is easier to follow the progress.
Paper trackers are available. You can draw them in any arbitrary form and find a ready-made habit tracker template, download, and print them. It will be much faster and cheaper than ordering online and waiting for delivery. In addition, they are easy to use. You can simply hang it in a visible place, for example, above your desktop, right on the door, or on the refrigerator, and you won’t be able to forget about the task from the tracker.
However, the paper healthy habit tracker template may be inconvenient for those who are often on the road. The sheet can be wrinkled, torn, or even lost. In this case, trackers for smartphones are the best solution.
Of course, in the application, users can also monitor progress for different periods of time: a week, a month, or a year. And in the electronic tracker, you can write notes for any day. This is useful if you need to remind yourself of something else besides the main goal, or to cheer up. For example, you can remind yourself to summarize the intermediate results in the middle of the month and evaluate the results achieved. The calendar displays marks with achievements and comments for specific dates.
You can download such a habit tracker on the Play Market and the App Store, where several dozen applications are available to help you track your habits.
There are also applications where the user can choose even or odd weeks for the implementation of the tasks, transfer them, and set the necessary frequency when they do not need daily repetitions so that the habit is formed. For example, strength training works best when you train three times a week instead of every day. Because muscles need time to recover.
You can also download the habit tracker, which has elements of the game. Users complete tasks and are rewarded with an additional incentive. So, you can learn English, and a tree will grow in the application. The longer you practice, the taller the tree will be.
True, such a program should be used with caution, because you can get too carried away with the game built into the application. If the user is prone to smartphone addiction, they should choose the simplest tracker without involving elements.
To begin with, it is important to understand that habit trackers are not a panacea, but nevertheless, they are a rather convenient way to develop a habit. And if one tracker does not fit, you can find another one - the one that works best for a particular person. Even if one day was missed from the schedule, it's not scary. You can continue the next day, and everything will be in order. The main thing is not to turn passes into a system and be ready to make an effort of will to continue what you started.