The Habit of Habit Tracking
When a habit is rewarded, it increases the chance of you doing it again. And when a habit or behavior is punished, it is avoided.
Delay gratification, enjoy the present
How do you make a habit satisfying?
And how do you ensure that you’re able to repeat the habit next time?
The only way is to ensure that you’re satisfied with the habit both in the present (even while delaying gratification) and be satisfied in the future.
This is an example: if you like to eat out instead of cooking, you can tell yourself that for every time that you don’t go out to eat and decide to cook, you’re going to save a particular amount of money.
Saving that amount is a reward in the present, which is also leading to a future reward. You will get to save more money and eat healthy meals.
How to stick with good habits everyday
The simplest way to do this is to measure progress.
If you can measure progress, it gives you the feeling that you’re almost there — at the end of your goals. It will keep you going.
This is the same as tracking your habits to see what you did.
You can use calendars, a journal, or anything to record what you’re doing.
It could be as simple as writing the day and the habit you did that day. You could also mark ‘X’ on a calendar to show that you’ve done a habit.
The good thing about this is that the more you see the tracks that you’ve made, the more it shows you that you’re doing something right.
This would motivate you to go on. So the benefit of actually tracking your habits is that number one, it’s obvious.
The benefit of tracking your habits is that it’s obvious. It’s attractive. It pushes you to want to do more.
It’s also very satisfying. It leads to repetition and that solidifies habit creation.
The habit of habit tracking also becomes a habit in itself.
The downside of habit tracking
Except you have a device or a way to automate your habits, habit tracking can be a burden sometimes.
It’s not a must that you track every habit or record every habit that you do.
Look out for one or some that are very important to you and track those. For other habits, you can continue with them and not track them.
Keeping up with consistency
What happens when you’ve been making good progress on a habit for some time and for one reason or the other, you broke your consistency streak.
What do you do?
It’s okay. Life happens.
The best thing to do is to get back and try and reach another streak.
This means that if you’ve been consistent about doing something for five days and you missed out on the sixth day, you shouldn’t feel bad.
That’s not a reason to be demotivated and stop the habit completely. Click back again.
Be very fast in how you recover.
A note of conclusion
While it’s great to track and measure progress, be mindful of not measuring the wrong things.
Make sure that whatever you are measuring leads to your overall goal and helps you strengthen your identity and who you’re becoming.
If you’ve followed this far, I hope you’re having a great time?
3 more days to go.
Subscribe here to get the next summary in your inbox.
Share this with everyone who haven’t gotten a chance to read Atomic Habits but would be interested in a book summary.
Catch you in the next one.
I plan to do this as a 13-day series. So, in 13 days, you can learn all about the book like you read it yourself.
This is Day 10.
Make your comments, ask your questions and let’s start a conversation in the comments section.
