What is a habit?
A habit is a routine. It is something that you do without even thinking about it. Habit tracker can help you achieve that.
It can be very powerful in your everyday life as it will occupy the sub conscient part of your brain instead of your active part. And therefore free your mind for more complex thoughts.
For instance, picking up your keys before leaving the house, or your wallet, or your purse. If you have to think about it every time, this is NOT a habit yet. But, together, we can solve that.
Today, we are going to see how we can create habit for ourselves.
If you want to read more about habits, you can:
How to create a habit?
To create a habit you need to actively think about doing this action. It could be going to the gym, doing the dishes, etc… Whatever the action is, it has to be actively in your mind, first.
Having the habit actively in your mind will create pathways in your brain to make this action more natural and obvious to your brain.
To make it even easier, you need Dopamine. This is the hormone which make you feel happiness.
There are a lot of tricks to trigger Dopamine secretion but we are going to focus on rewards here.
How to trigger Dopamine through rewards? Habit Tracker
I designed a simple piece of paper that would help you trigger Dopamine when you are performing your habit.
Above is the habit tracker I came up with. Feel free to click on the image and download the file.
How to use the Habit Tracker
Let’s walk through each part of the habit tracker.
The first row is to own your habits. Write down your name there. It is yours. Own it !
Habit Tracker – monthly
The next 12 blocks are for monthly habits.
The name is to name the habit you are tracking in this space. A monthly habit could for instance be “Yoga“. You can write down “Yoga” for all 12 blocks and set the month from January to December to tackle a full year of “Yoga“.
Or, you can write down different name in each box, all for the current month.
Each time you perform the task you are tracking, cross the cell. The more cell you cross, the more point you have.
I added more than 31 number, first of all because there were space for it in the design but also because some task can be slightly more frequent than once a day along the month.
For instance, “Put the dirty laundry in the hamper“, if you go do your “Yoga” in the middle of the day, you might have dirty clothes to put in the hamper more than once a day !
Habit Tracker – Quarterly
The two blocks of 4 points are for bigger things.
This block are for larger tasks. For instance, “Taking a week of vacation“.
It was thought for quarterly event but can be used for weekly things too.
If you write down Points when: I do the laundry in June, then you can use this area for weekly tracking along the month.
Habit Tracker – Extra points
The last section was designed for more random events.
Here are 100 points to claim for anything you could think of. Here are a few examples:
- Cooking dinner for myself this year
- Going out for a drinks this year
- Take time for myself this year
- Push up I did this month
- Feel free to add more ideas in the comments below
How to use the Habit Tracker?
- Click here
- Print a few
- Get a Clipboard with Storage Box
- Get a pen with 4 colors and a hole at the end
- Get some twine
- Use the twine to attache the pen to the clipboard
- Put one of the Habit Tracker on top
- Put the rest in the storage
- Write down your name in the first line
- Fill up the fields in the boxes for the habits you would like to track
- You are now ready to track your habits !
Conclusion
Now you can track your progress in your habit development.
Please comment below if you have any idea on how to improve this system.
Feel free to post your trackers as well to show people your progress !