Does your habit tracker overwhelm you? Does one glance at those rows and rows of unchecked items make you want to seal up your bullet journal in King Tut’s tomb and not look at it for three thousand years (at least)? Maybe it’s because you’re tracking too much.

Edited from an Original Post Published 07/19/2018

Is Your Habit Tracker a To-Do List Tracker?

I used to track every task in my monthly habit tracker. It wasn’t until a light bulb dinged me in the head that I realized I was trying to do too much. Tracking too much split my focus, and I never developed the habits I wanted to cultivate. The thing to remember when it comes to habit tracking is these are the items you’re striving to move from the forefront of your mind to the automated part of your brain. Otherwise, you’re just tracking a to-do list.

Don’t get me wrong, and I love a good to-do list. However, sometimes these two trackers seem to intertwine too much.

Daily to-dos fluctuate, which means they are not ‘cultivated habits’ in my mind. Habits, in my opinion, should be created, cared for, and purposefully developed so they can thrive on their own. After all, isn’t that what a habit should do – survive on its own?

I don’t track things I always do to mark them off. Instead, I track the important habits that I want to cultivate. My to-do list is on a different page.

Why Not Track it All?

If you’re like me, you try to take on too much all the time. Everything seems important, and you want to improve everything. (Isn’t that why you track habits in the first place?) Let me teach you something I learned the hard way.

I’ve struggled with quantity over quality my whole life. Slowing down, eliminating unnecessary or fluff, and focusing on just the essentials is a struggle. I cannot decide what Skillshare classes to take (so I try to take them all) and end up splitting my focus.

If everything is a priority, nothing is.

Here’s something to consider: Where do you start if you make everything number one in your book? That’s where overwhelm sets in. That’s when the entire month’s habit trackers go untouched.

If you don’t focus or don’t prioritize, everything will feel rushed or mediocre. Nothing will seem significant. Putting your effort into building a few important habits and tracking those results will yield better (and faster) results than trying to change everything at once. Once you create a habit, you can move on to other items. But there is an art to creating a habit. We’ll talk about those steps below.

I’ve always felt like a jack of all trades but a master of nothing. Especially in my career as a master of nothing. So starting small with these 5 important habits made me really think about what was meaningful in my life.

However, if you feel like just five habits are not enough to cover personal and career improvements split them out and choose five personal and professional habits. This method helps me focus on work when I’m at work and enhances my home life when I’m at home.

Narrow Your Focus to 5 Tracking Important Habits

Don’t get me wrong, I still have a to-do list that I check off, but I use my habit tracker differently. I use it to condition my responses to cues and situations. Tracking the habits and seeing a completed action becomes the reward. Habit tracking for me is deeper, more personal development. For instance, I chose patient parenting as one of my five important habits. Within this one habit are a million tiny mindset shifts that I need to improve. It’s, unfortunately, not a once-and-done checkmark.

I decided to eliminate the daily to-do items from my habit tracker and focus on tracking important habits, so I pared down the number of habits I tracked each day to five. If you need six habits on your list, by all means, track six instead. I chose the number five because it seemed like a good number. I could count them on one hand (so is that considered a handful?). And it wasn’t so few that I felt frustrated by the lack of progress. But you choose the number that’s comfortable for you.

This idea is designed to get you to focus on a few things rather than all the things. Note: Please customize this idea to suit your needs and build a system that helps you accomplish more and eliminate habit-tracking overwhelm that tends to hurt your habit-creating efforts more than help.

What Habits Do I Track?

I’ll show you which habits I choose to track, and below I’ll illustrate how I track them. Notice that I create a summary of what a successful habit looks like (my goal).

Here are the habits I track (right now):

• Patient Parenting: the goal is to curb my reactions and think before I speak or react.
• Productivity: Using time wisely and ending the day with the feeling of accomplishment rather than regret that I wasted an entire day on games or tv.
• Scriptures: read or listen to motivating talks or scriptures for 10 minutes per day.
• Prayers: The goal is to pray twice per day, but I’m focusing on establishing the regular habit of once per day, then I’ll shift the focus to twice per day.
• Compliment: I think of many good things about people in my head but find that I rarely say them out loud. The goal is to say one compliment out loud that I normally wouldn’t say.

If you chose just five habits, what would you choose to cultivate?

How to Track the Important Habits

To help know when to mark the box or leave it blank, I write a list of expectations to fulfill for each line on my habit tracker—dos and don’ts for each of the important habits I track.

1) Make a list of habits that you want to track & narrow it down to five (or a small number)

Choose your focus! Decide where you want to see improvement in your life and start there.

2) Make a list of Dos and Don’ts for Each Habit (Set Expectations)

Jot down your realistic expectations for marking off the habit each day.
Creating a list of expectations for each habit (especially for habits with no clear-cut way to answer ‘done’ each day) makes it easier to see where you’re falling short and track when you’re making an effort.

3) Determine Your Reward

What reward will you receive for accomplishing your goal? Sometimes all you need is to mark it off in your habit tracker. If you receive satisfaction from checking off items on your to-do list – then marking the habit on your habit tracker might be good enough.

4) Schedule a Time for the Habit

Scheduling your Habit into your day means you won’t be scrambling at the last minute to finish it before bed. If you want to create a habit, it needs to be treated as part of your day. Have it follow (or precede) an already established habit.

Want to drink 8 cups of water? Drink a glass of water before you eat breakfast. Or drink a glass before each cup of coffee. Incorporate the habit you want to cultivate into your established routine so it can grow.

5) Review Each Day

Give yourself a little burst of dopamine and mark off that habit daily. You might consider marking off the habit immediately after it’s done so your brain feels satisfied and wants to do it again. That’s how habits are cemented into your brain by creating a craving for the reward, as Charles Duhigg suggests in his book The Power of Habit.

6) Review Monthly

Review your habit progress each month at the end of the month and determine if you need to adjust any efforts. Are you expecting too much? Do you need to adjust your expectations or the timing of your habit? Take the opportunity to commend yourself as well for what effort you put in. Then resolve to continue or make improvements.

7) Keep going!

If you mess up, keep going. If creating habits were easy, I’m sure you’d have done it already.

Remember:

You are trying to create a habit. A habit by nature is doing something without thinking about it – it’s automated. So give your habit the best opportunity to survive on its own by including it in your life. Don’t make it a fight to have a spot in your schedule. Unfortunately, good habits won’t seed on their own. You must create a place for them in your life and then nurture it so it takes hold.

How I Track Difficult to Track Habits

Patient parenting includes taking a breath before reacting. It means allowing my kids to talk even when I know they are wrong. It’s about letting them be noisy (within reason) and finding the good through the chaos.

Truly cultivating this habit means not interjecting my opinion into each situation and telling them how to resolve an issue instead of letting them figure it out. Sometimes it means I put on my noise-canceling headphones so I don’t lose them if they stop arguing with each other. But this is the type of person I’m working on developing. I feel like this habit is a deep one that will take years to accomplish. Maybe one I’ll figure out once I’m a grandmother.

Some days, I mark the habit ‘half done’ as an indicator that I tried even though I fell short.

Tracking productivity means so many things. I made a list of things I could do in 10 minutes or less. Doing any of these items makes me feel productive. It helps to give credit! I created a page in my bullet journal called “Give Credit Where Credit is Due” to write down often overlooked accomplishments. Many days, I don’t feel like I get anything done!

Being productive (and giving myself credit for it) greatly boost future productivity. It seems to multiply on itself.

It’s About the Feeling

It feels good to mark things off – not just mark them off, but by tracking the important habits that will help me become a better person.

Because I actually put in effort and forethought before doing the activity, which is key to forming a habit. I can honestly tell you that I stop and think about doing something productive or taking 10 minutes to straighten a room. The best is when I stop myself when dealing with my kids and ask myself, ‘is this patient parenting’? It’s then that I know my habit-tracking efforts are working.

Are you a track everything kind of person, or do you track just a few things? How does it work for you? What important habits would you choose to track?

Bonus! Real-Time Handlettering Video

If you love lettering videos, here’s the video where I letter this quote in real-time – no superspeed lettering on this one! Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

• What to Do if Bullet Journaling Feels Overwhelming?
• How to Set Up a Habit Tracker in your Planner
• Favorite Reasons for Habit Tracking