Habit tracker
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“Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound and turn into remarkable results if you're willing to stick with them for years.” - James Clear
A habit is a behavior that we often repeat. Most of the time, it is subconscious behavior and may seem like we have little control over it.
However, this is far from the truth, and the author of the book Atomic Habits, James Clear, would greatly disagree with it. If we understand how our habits form and why, we can better understand how we can shape new habits and change our bad ones.
This time, we want to focus on the definition of a habit itself, which says it is an action that we often repeat. In the aforementioned book, the author describes it as voting at the polls. The candidate with the most votes wins the election. Winning does not require all voters' votes. The same goes for our habits. If we want to be a person who learns or a person who exercises, we do not need 100% of the votes to confirm it. The majority of the votes or the majority of days is enough. If we spend a few minutes each day studying, then we are a person who studies. And these few minutes each day are enough to start believing in this story of our success.
The more we believe that we are a person who studies, the more we will feel like sitting down and studying. And the more often we sit down and study, the more we will believe that we are truly that person.
To start a new habit, we can start with the votes that say this habit has become a part of us. The easiest way to collect such votes is with a habit tracker. We have added the habit tracker that we use below, which you can also use. It is one of the simple Canva templates, which we slightly altered to our taste. You can find the PDF file at the bottom of the post.
Just after you finish the desired habit, mark an X on that day. You can leave the days you don't succeed blank or completely color in the square. If you start with a small habit - just a few minutes of studying is enough to earn an X - then you will quickly see that it is often harder to leave the square blank than to do just a few minutes of studying and earn an X.
It also works if we simply draw the tracker ourselves on a sheet of paper or make it in a notebook. We advise you to keep the format of tracking habits yearly. We believe in ourselves much more if we see how many days we have already succeeded. When these days turn into months, we create a strong belief that we can succeed. We thus create a "chain" of X’s, and the goal is to not break the chain.
Let's not forget that there will also be days when we will fail to do our habits. This is not the time to give up on them. This also happened to us several times. We simply couldn't do it on a particular day. But as we mentioned above - it's just about collecting votes. If we collect 80% of the votes, we can still call it a success. So, if you miss a day (believe us, you will miss some days, but it's okay), you can use the rule that you don't skip the habit twice. So, if we miss a day, all we have to do is start again the next day.
The author of the book describes this nicely: "Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit."
So, which habit have you chosen to follow?
