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Home » mid-month habit check

Why Track Habits?

January 12, 2023 Leave a Comment

Why Do You Track Habits?

Why Track Habits? The reason behind the flurry of habit tracking spreads - interpreted through the lens of "the happiness project" book. | ChocolateMusings.com

Have you ever stopped to think of why you track habits? Here are some insights from a book I’m reading by Gretchen Rubin called “The Happiness Project,” which gives a pretty good definition of ‘why’ someone should spend their time and energy tracking habits.

Tracking Habits is Boring – Or is it?

Why track habits? At first glance, it sounds very tedious and mundane. That’s what I thought, too. Then I tried it, and I liked tracking the habits. I liked tracking them almost more than doing them. It’s giving yourself that little star, the little thumbs up that you followed through, that you did something you set out to do.

Adding habits to my circle habit tracker for the month on a black page journal sheet | ChocolateMusings.com

Habits: In Pursuit of Happiness

I finally figured out why I like habit tracking so much. It’s not necessarily in the end goal. In fact, the pursuit of happiness makes an overall improvement. The purpose of a habit isn’t to have it end. The goal is to have it continue without effort.

A habit tracker’s unwritten (now written) goal is to have items fall off the list of consciously trying to be a better person and continue to be that better person without thinking about it.

Thanks to Gretchen Rubin and her book (which I’m currently reading on my Kindle Paperwhite), “The Happiness Project,” she defined what I subconsciously knew:

“It isn’t goal attainment by the process of striving after goals – it’s growth that brings happiness” –

Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

Never Ending Habits?

Sometimes writing never-ending habits (i.e., reading scriptures or patiently parenting, doing dishes, daily cleaning) every month seemed like I was spinning my wheels and not accomplishing anything. But the accomplishment is ‘the every day.’ It’s ‘the striving’ to improve my life and the lives of those around me as I progress to be a better human being.

Though I’d been married for over a decade and had children, I felt like I earned an ‘adulting’ gold star when I finally considered that I could permanently take ‘doing dishes’ off my habit tracker – because I made a habit of doing them. Believe me, this was a big accomplishment, and I worked hard to create that habit.

At one point, I decided to weigh myself every day. Keep in mind that I do it – not to gauge my weight per se – but to set the mindset for the day and to reestablish the goals I’ve set for myself. This is a habit I broke and need to get back into.

Want More on This Topic?

Read more about my health journey and how habits + journaling are helping me achieve big goals. Trackers.

Change Yourself for the Better & Others Will Follow

As Gretchen states in her book, “you can’t change anyone but yourself.” But I would say that if you change yourself for the better, others will follow suit. I started making my bed habitually. Sometimes I’d make only my side and sometimes both. It’s been a few years since I started this little habit, and my husband beats me to making the bed. Win-win.

Sometimes, he only makes his side as I do on occasion. But now it feels like a joint effort.

Do you know what the best part is? I never said anything, but he started following my example. I’m not sure if it was guilt, but a change in my habit has also changed my husband’s habits.

***FULL DISCLAIMER: I do not proclaim that this will change your significant other’s habits – I just happened to see positive results in this instance.

On the reverse side: if I notice that my kids are being particularly unkind to each other, I have to step back and ask if they are acting that way because I do, too. Those reality checks hurt (a lot).

Mid-Month Habit Checks

As the month progresses, I sometimes get off course. That’s why I like to do mid-month habit checks – because the middle of the month is when I lose momentum. And simply reviewing my daily goals helps me realign to what I deem essential. It’s all in pursuit of happiness.

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How Do You Keep Yourself on Track?

How do you keep yourself on track? Do you do a ‘mid-month habit check?’ If not, try to add it to your planner on the 15th/16th of every month. Then compare where you want to be versus where you’re trending, then make adjustments as necessary.

If you give your habits the priority they deserve, these seemingly insignificant habit checkups will help you in your pursuit. It’s a great way to reevaluate your course throughout the month.

I’m sure as you see steady progress, you’ll come to find out why you track habits. I know that tracking habits and seeing progress helped me progress in positive ways. If you fall away from tracking habits, there’s no better time to start tracking again.

Why Track Habits? The reason behind the flurry of habit tracking spreads - interpreted through the lens of "the happiness project" book. | ChocolateMusings.com

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Filed Under: Blog, Get Organized & Start Planning, Habits, My Muses (My Favorites & Inspiration), Start Planning Here Tagged: bullet journaling, create organizing habits, creating habits, habit tracker, habit tracking, habits, mid-month habit check, planning

Habit Tracking Overwhelm? Try Tracking 5 Important Habits

February 15, 2022 Leave a Comment

Habit tracking overwhelm? Try tracking just 5 important habits each month - shift your focus from improving everything to a few things and see how fast they change | ChocolateMusings.com

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

Table of contents

  • Is Your Habit Tracker a To-Do List Tracker?
  • Why Not Track it All?
  • Narrow Your Focus to 5 Tracking Important Habits
  • What Habits Do I Track?
  • How to Track the Important Habits
    • 1) Make a list of habits that you want to track & narrow it down to five (or a small number)
    • 2) Make a list of Dos and Don’ts for Each Habit (Set Expectations)
    • 3) Determine Your Reward
    • 4) Schedule a Time for the Habit
    • 5) Review Each Day
    • 6) Review Monthly
    • 7) Keep going!
    • Remember:
    • How I Track Difficult to Track Habits
  • It’s About the Feeling
  • Bonus! Real-Time Handlettering Video
Habit tracking overwhelm? Try tracking just 5 important habits each month - shift your focus from improving everything to a few things and see how fast they change | ChocolateMusings.com

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.

Habit tracker vs. To Do List - Which is yours? Try tracking less to accomplish more | ChocolateMusings.com

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.

Overwhelmed by your habit tracker? Try these suggestions to start *actually* forming habits | ChocolateMusings.com

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?

Habits make your world go round - circle habit tracker | ChocolateMusings.com

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)

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

  3. Determine Your Reward

  4. Schedule a Time for the Habit

  5. Review Each Day

  6. Review Monthly

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 to track the important habits - find more information on the blog! | ChocolateMusings.com

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.

question mark - chocolatemusings.com

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

Here are some books I’ve read on organizing, decluttering, and habits. I’d love a recommendation and add it to my list. Let me know if you have more to add in the comments below.  

 

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Filed Under: Blog, Bullet Journal, Get Organized & Start Planning, Habits Tagged: Bullet Journal, habits, handlettering, lettering, mid-month habit check

April Mid-Month Habit Check: Humility & Progress

April 15, 2019 2 Comments

April Mid Month Habit Check - The theme: Humility | ChocolateMusings.com

Mid-Month Habit Check Time!

It’s mid-month habit check time! Mid-month habit checks are where I groan and squirm uncomfortably because this is where I’m accountable for my actions for the month so far and give myself a chance to improve in the second half.  P.S. I still love my transparent habit tracker used in February & April!

First of all, let me tell you why I track habits because I didn’t for the longest time. I thought it was silly and time-consuming. But this spread in my journal has probably been the reason why I kept bullet journaling or planning for so long.

Note: Here’s a post showing you how to set up a habit tracker, and why I like to track habits.

Tracking your habits gives you power over yourself like nothing else I can explain. I don’t monitor a tremendous amount of habits. And sometimes I list a habit on the tracker to start reminding myself to think about doing it. I started reading habit books and found that what they said was true – you manage what you monitor. I can attest to that.

This month I tracked ten habits:

  • Patient Parenting
  • Scriptures
  • Prayers
  • Learning
  • Blog
  • Product
  • Productive
  • Clean Daily
  • Plan
  • Time Out
April Mid-Month Habit Check - are you on track? | ChocolateMusings.com

Most of them I’m pretty good about doing. I give myself half points some days because I know I tried, but could be better. Patient parenting scored a lot of half-points where I’d be fine for most of the day, and then something would light my fuse, and I’d blow up or become angry.

This month, I also struggled with prayer & scriptures. I don’t know if you pray or similar, but it’s an act of humility. And I struggle with that. Lots of reasons why come to mind, and that is most definitely a post for another time. But sometimes realizing why we are struggling with something makes it easier to fix.

Mid-month habit time is an excellent time for me to do some introspection and assess what I’m prioritizing in my life or what is not a priority and what I should consider changing. I’m guessing if I show more humility and pray like I intend to do when I wrote my habit checks, my patient parenting score would go up.

Always Progressing

If I make an effort to do any of these ten things daily, I know I’m trying, I’m progressing. Never consider yourself a failure because you tried. Sure, there’s room for improvement, but it’s not a failure.

That’s why I post my mid-month habit checks, to remind myself that it’s ok as long as I’m trying. And to give me a chance for the rest of the month to increase my effort. Sometimes I realize I’ve focused on the wrong things. Other times I realize I put too much on my plate.

It’s a great time to evaluate and give yourself a chance to rejuvenate your focus. How does my mid-month habit check compare to yours? Do you see any patterns?

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Filed Under: Blog, Get Organized & Start Planning, Habits Tagged: #BuJo, #bulletjournal #bujo, 2019, april, Bullet Journal, habit tracker, habit tracking, improvement, mid-month habit check, planner

About Me


Hi! I'm Tricia, the creative behind ChocolateMusings.com, I know how it feels to lose your inner muse. After years of darkness (which I call the dark ages of my life), I found my inner muse hiding in the forgotten corners of my soul, I vowed never to lose sight of her again.

Bullet journaling helped reignite the passion for art and living life again while organizing my days. I also discovered modern calligraphy and watercolor. Since then, my use of the bullet journal system has evlolved and I call it 'creative planning'. Here on the blog, I show you how to use your planner to ignite your inner muse and explore creativity and art while staying beautifully organized and living a joyful life.

I invite you to grab some good chocolate and dive into my musings. Let’s ignite your inner muse.

Read more on the about me page. You can also find my policies and disclosures here.

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