6 Ways to Start Habit Tracking

25 Aug 6 Ways to Start Habit Tracking

Are you ready to create habits that last? Do you want to learn a routine that you can repeat consistently? You are not alone, and we are here to help! Here are our six tips to start habit tracking.

Ways to Start Habit Tracking

1. Do Not Try to Do Too Much

One of the biggest reasons that people cannot consistently keep up with good habits is they try to do too much at once. It is possible to avoid this by keeping your goals simple or by breaking them up into smaller objectives. 

An example of doing too much is trying to lose an extreme amount of weight in an unhealthy amount of time. Rather than set an unrealistic goal, add healthy habits into your daily life that will help you achieve your goal of losing weight.

2. Be Specific with Your Goals

Having goals that are too general or too broad will delay being able to attain them. This is because when your goals are not specific enough, you have no real way of measuring your success at achieving them. 

Goals that are specific help you to take ownership of your role in accomplishing them. By having concrete metrics to assess your progress, you can definitively know when you have achieved your goals.

For example, saying that you want financial freedom is not specific, but saying you want to have $10,000 saved by the time you are 32 is. With a specific goal like that, you can start to work on the habits you need to formulate to achieve it, such as automatically transferring money to your savings each month.

3. Create a Routine That Sets You Up for Success

A good basis for any habits you would like to track is building a routine that incorporates the habits into your daily life. Consistently including your habits into your daily routine will help you maintain them every day.

One good way to accomplish this is by including your habits as a part of your morning or evening routine and to set up systems that help make it easier to maintain your habits. For example, if you would like to make sure you are drinking at least eight glasses of water a day, you can add drinking a glass of water when you first wake up to your morning routine. 

You can also leave yourself glasses or bottles of water in areas around your house or workspace to serve as both visual and physical reminders to drink. For instance, if you use a Keurig in the morning for your coffee, fill a glass of water and leave it next to the Keurig the night before.

4. Hold Yourself Accountable by Keeping Track of Your Progress

A big part of making sure your actions become habits is tracking them so you can see how you are progressing. Tracking your progress allows you to see if you will be able to achieve your goals by the deadline you have imposed. This makes it easier for you to adjust your goals and deadlines as needed so they are more realistic or accessible. 

For example, committing to working out five times a week for 30 minutes may seem like a reasonable habit to begin, but it might not be realistic with your family and work commitments. If you realize this early in your habit-building process, you can make the switch to four 45-minute workouts a week instead.

5. Make It Fun

Setting goals and tracking habits do not have to be boring or a chore! You can make it fun by:

• Rewarding yourself when you reach certain milestones
• Celebrating when you have performed a habit a certain amount of times in a row
• Using fun stickers to track your progress or mark the days you do something

6. Know Your “Why”

Understanding why you want to make something a habit or why you would like to achieve a goal will give you an internal motivator to accomplish it. This helps make achieving the goals more rewarding, and it makes it easier to steadily build your habits and routine.

Use Artful Agenda to Start Tracking Your Habits

A habit tracking feature within Artful Agenda is coming soon! Until it’s released, our repeating tasks function can help you remember to perform your new habits as you work on incorporating them into your routine. The Custom List section in Artful Agenda’s Day view is perfect for this. You can set the repeating tasks so you can check them off every day as you do them.

You can also create a master list of habits you would like to add to your daily life and track them there. Once you have successfully incorporated something into your everyday routine, you can check it off in the master list and stop the repeating task.

Start habit tracking with Artful Agenda.