“The best way to predict your future is to create it” – Abraham Lincoln.
This week we’re going to talk about habit tracking tools. What can you do to capture your goals, how you’re doing, and have some progress set in place? This week, we’re going to talk about analog tracking paper, other types of easy tricks to do to track habits, maybe in a way that doesn’t feel like habit tracking. Then next time, we’ll talk about digital forms of tracking habits and goals. When planning how to track your habits and goals, it’s always great to get the right tools in the right spot. And a lot of people track tools and a lot of different ways. First, there are non-technical tools like planners and charts, which are great because you don’t rely on logging into a thing. Hopefully, you place them in areas of your house where you see them all the time. Family members or friends can glance at it and see how you’re doing. A lot of people put these at work when they’re in the office.
Some people feel very strongly that you need to write them down by hand and read it on paper. There is a robust mental response when you do it that way. It even suggests that merely writing your goals down on paper creates a psychological pathway to allow your brain to make it start happening. Interestingly, when I was in my 20s and was poor and confused, my roommate, who is also equally as poor and confused as I was, started this project where we took five goals that we wanted to happen before we were 30. We wrote them down on a piece of paper, and we stored them away. I’m not even sure what happened to them. Some were big goals that were hard for us to believe that we’d be able to get done. But interestingly enough, they all happened. The very last one came true six months before my 30th birthday when I went to Disneyland for the first time. It worked for us. I’m not sure if it was because we wrote it on the paper or if we just declared them as goals. It can be very simple what you do to record these goals, and I have a real tendency to make things very complex. At one point, I had an exercise tracker that took longer to complete and doing the exercise themselves. Don’t do that. Simple is better, and use small steps and small rewards that are the key to any system you have for tracking and rewarding behavior.
A fellow named Mark Murphy did a study a while ago talking about writing down goals and people who vividly described their goals. He found that they were 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to succeed at their goals when they write them down vividly. He explains that it has to do with how your brain stores the information. And that a piece of paper, first of all, is a very easy way to access and review your goals. But he feels that on a deeper biological process, how we encode the goals into our brain is different in our hippocampus when we do it on paper compared to doing it in maybe a digital format. It gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, is remembered more often, and then we’re more likely to do it. He has a whole study that would be interesting to talk about in an entirely different podcast on this topic. But writing it down, he felt, was the key to getting through the goals. There are several ways where you can track different types of check boxes and stickers and all sorts of very vivid paper rewards that people can look at and appreciate. I posted an article from James Clear on creating a habit tracker and another article that was very good on creating your own system and writing it down on paper.
https://management30.com/blog/writing-down-goals-for-success/
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/habit-tracker
The Full Focus Planner and other planners are another great way of habit tracking. And as an analog system. The Full Focus Planner is the one I know the best. The way it works is that there are places to track the habits. There are places to establish your goals. There are ways of setting up short term and long term planning. This is the thing I need to do Today. This is the best thing I can do this week to get my life in a good place. It has some very nice time tracking in there. It also has a place so that you can put your schedule. It has other places where you can set your goals and some questions about how your week went last week and what you plan to do next week. It really is something that was geared and written towards being successful with your habits and your productivity. They are a little bit expensive, but they’re also nice because they’re generic and you can use them any time. It’s not something that has set dates on it as the old Franklin Covey planners did. That’s one kind of an analog system that’s out there.
The Full Focus Planner and other planners are another great way of habit tracking. And as an analog system. The Full Focus Planner is the one I know the best. The way it works is that there are places to track the habits. There are places to establish your goals. There are ways of setting up short term and long term planning. This is the thing I need to do Today. This is the best thing I can do this week to get my life in a good place. It has some very nice time tracking in there. It also has a place so that you can put your schedule. It has other places where you can set your goals and some questions about how your week went last week and what you plan to do next week. It really is something that was geared and written towards being successful with your habits and your productivity. They are a little bit expensive, but they’re also nice because they’re generic and you can use them any time. It’s not something that has set dates on it as the old Franklin Covey planners did. That’s one kind of an analog system that’s out there.
There are also other sets of systems like The One Thing, where he has a series of handouts and papers that we discussed in previous podcasts that you can just fill out and keep track of. It is not anything that’s entirely expensive. You just print them out, and then you fill them in, and then you post them up someplace where you can see it and be reminded of it. That’s another analog system.
An interesting way to have to remind yourself of your goals is having a set speech that you might say every morning. It’s not something that has to be that deep or philosophical. It doesn’t have to pat you on the back. But having a catchphrase, or a particular goal that you say, every morning, when you get out of bed, “Today is gonna be a great day because I’m going to be the healthiest I can be!” Today is going to be a great day because I am going to focus on my career and do the things that will get me noticed at work.” “Today is going to be a great day because I’m going to focus on organizing this house!” Whatever it is, have this kind of phrase or phrases that remind you of why Today will be a great day because you’re going to focus on your habits. And then, even at nighttime, right before bed, you can say, “Today was a great day! I cleaned out parts of my kitchen. I exercise for 30 minutes, and I avoided having sugar all day long.” It helps you to keep the focus of your goals, to remind yourself in the morning, and then pat yourself on the back at night.
Ideas that I’ve done, I put on write on wipe off the Post-It notes. The idea came from BJ Fogg, and he talked about using Post-It notes as better tracking systems that are actually using digital managers. And the reason is that you get to see it, stick it places, and then when you’re done with it, you can rip it off and crinkle it up and throw it in the trash. And so it was one of these very meaningful ways of tracking your habits. He also talks about weekly habits by putting them on pieces of paper with Post-It notes, and then every week flipping over the piece of paper. And then, as you do them, you move the stickers back over onto the other side. It’s easy. It’s low tech. It costs nothing to do. I just thought it was a great idea. Some people use bullet journals. They’re really into that and tracking their habits and their goals and their dreams. Some people are artists, and they’re able to draw them out and vivid pictures.
Once was I created the Adventure Fund. The Adventure Fund was me putting money into a separate account because, at that time, I had a very tight budget. But every time I completed an exercise, I would base it on the minutes that I exercised, and I’d put money into this separate account that was for Jill to have an adventure because really my budget didn’t allow me to have adventures. This was a nice way of rewarding myself with something that I couldn’t normally get out of my budget. Every time I exercise, the money went in. Every time I got my weekly goals, more money went in. I also had a multiplier, based on how many streaks of weeks I actually did it time after time. The whole goal of my project was small little steps done every day, but rewards for continually doing them week after week after week. I think that the problem with my system is it was too complicated. I would love to revisit this again, with a little bit more simple method of doing it.
The second idea I thought about came from this study that talked about why it is that people will not save for retirement but will do things of luck, like bingo or lottery. Why are they able to do things that don’t promise to give them actual money instead of the things like investments that will actually give them money. There’s one country in Africa, and I believe it was Nigeria did in order to get people to put money into their retirement funds, is they created a lottery system based on it. They actually would take that money and invest it on behalf of the people who were investing the money. But there was some sort of a prize they said: “Hey, maybe you’re gonna win $100 too!” That way, it encouraged people to put money into their retirement fund, even though they were just investing it because that small ability to get a prize to encourage people to actually invest in their future. What I did is I was going to create this jar of rewards. And there were going to be small rewards, and medium-sized rewards and large rewards. And every time I did a daily exercise, there was a little piece of paper, and I had these prearranged awards. It might be something simple, like an extra snack or $15 to go see your favorite movie, or just a kind word or any little, tiny rewards. And then I’d fold them up on little pieces of paper, and I put them in a bin, and every time I accomplished a small goal, I pick one of these papers, and I throw it in the jar. Then there were medium-sized goals and then big ones. The big ones included things like a PlayStation or a Switch or an extra two nights for a vacation. Something really exciting and big. And those were gigantic streaks that you had to earn. You just didn’t get to put the big rewards in the system unless you did something big. I was planning on that being something like a six-month goal or an entire year’s worth of exercise streaks where I accomplish my weekly exercise goals every day for a year. If so, a big prize went into the jar. Every week, I got to pull a prize if I did my exercise out of the jar and got that prize. It was a very low tech way of having my own personal lottery to make it exciting to actually get my exercise done. I still think it’s a great idea. I haven’t done it yet. But I might use it for something else other than exercise because right now, that’s going particularly well.
The last way is to hire a trainer or coach, and it’s expensive. I’ll tell you that it costs money. But honestly, it’s really worth it if it’s something that you can afford, or at least afford to do it on a limited basis if you don’t have a lot of money. I thought I could live without my fitness trainer in my life. And I found out that having my fitness trainer, Heather is just invaluable. When she’s not around, I’m really hit or miss on my goals. When she’s around and keeping me accountable, I fall right back into line. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I tend to do things when other people expect me to do them. She’s that expectation and that accountability that I really need. I think other people like my friend, they can just do whatever it is they set their heart on, and so they get those things done intrinsically or internally. Tracking is more important to them instead of encouragement and accountability. I absolutely need that accountability level.
So then, the last thing I’ll talk about is my own Hawaii Adventure. I wanted to do this virtual mission kind of thing, but I really wanted to make something a lot more personal. I created my own Hawaii adventure challenge. I’m doing this with four of my friends. What they do is they tell me how much they exercised every week. There’s a color map that I made on a graphic software program that has little check boxes for each mile that you do. Whether you’re bike riding, walking, rowing, whatever it is you’re doing, you fill in the boxes. I have like a scorecard about what everything equals. There are even some side challenges, which I call “Climbing Mountains,” “Snorkeling,” or “Surfing.” Climbing Mountains is going up and down stairs x many flights. Snorkeling is doing planks, and if you have ever been snorkeling, it’s a lot like doing a lot of planks. Then Surfing, which is squats, push-ups, lunges, which if you’ve ever been surfing is a lot like that, too. What I do every week is I send them an email where they ended up stopping on the map based on their own exercise. If this person’s over here in Waikiki, I talk about what they did and where they ate for dinner, and I try to make it feel like a real-life adventure. I have real-life postcards that I’m going to send them as they get to new islands. Print them off on my printer, and mail them postcards. Welcome to Oahu. Welcome here. Welcome there. I try to make it a little bit more fun and exciting. It’s not a race. It’s not a competition. It’s just something that’s meant for all of us who live in a place where winters can get rather dreary when it comes to exercise to make it more fun to make it a little bit more exciting to do your exercises.
Those are just some ways of keeping track of habits and exercise and no technology. I hope some of this helps and it makes it interesting for you. The best way that you can actually track habits and do goal setting and habit tracking is to make it fun and make it really clear and easy to do, have tiny rewards, and just get it done. Pick a system and go with it starting at the New Year. It’s just a day on the calendar. It’s just 24 hours on Earth. But it’s a great time to start something new because it feels like a clean slate, so think about it. Now while we have a couple of weeks left for the year, decide how you are going to track your habits next year.
Summary
- come up with a system that’s easy to use and has lots of rewards, and fits how your brain works.
- Make sure it’s simple. Make sure it’s something that is not complicated and doesn’t have big hard rules, and that you can follow it easily.
- Consider tracking or rewarding with friends or family. It’s always great to do these together. But if you can come up with a system that works for everybody in your life, this will be more motivating. You can all just do it together and keep each other accountable.
Challenge
Identify one method in the analog system that best fits your way and give it a shot for a couple of weeks. See if you can fill it out and track a little bit. Have some minor experiments.
We got the new year coming up in a couple of weeks. This is a time to just dabble with a new system, and then maybe by the time the new year comes, you’ll be able to bring that system online and start using it in all earnest. So again, these are all analog things that we talked about non-technology that you can use to help you meet your goals. We’re going to talk about technology apps that you can use to help you meet your goals and keep track of your habits next week.
For our fun advice, this quote comes from the movie Scrooged,
“It’s Christmas Eve, and it’s a one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier. We share a little more.”
That is great advice. It’s a wonderful wish for our Christmas time, and hopefully, it doesn’t take a ghost to remind us to do all of those things.
