post #2: tracking habits

how i maintain and grow my routine

I’ve been substantially better with happiness / productivity / motivation this year in general. (except when I wasn’t, basically this entire summer, but nevermind that)

Something I attribute a huge proportion of that growth to is the life tracking Google Sheets workbook I use, so today I’d like to just talk about what’s on it and why.

The core of this workbook is a tracking spreadsheet which I’ve named Daily Habits. 

You can see all the habits here, if you’d like.

What the habits have in common is that there is no ambiguity. 

Every habit is either

• Something not to do

• Something to do at a specific time

So I can never go “should I be doing this thing right now?”

What does this spreadsheet do for me?

It provides accountability. The rules are set up so that I’m actually expecting myself to get a green x on every single row each day. It’s actively hard to consider doing things that would get me bad marks on the sheet, unless I’m somehow spiraling. (I also have external accountability because I shared the sheet with my partners.)

It clarifies my standards. If something’s on the sheet, I expected myself to do it. If something’s not on the sheet, I didn’t expect myself to do it. Almost always, “being someone who actually follows the standards I set for myself” is more important than whatever advantages I could get by not following the standards. And “always following my standards” is doable when they’re clear and minimal.

It frees up my memory. I only have so much space in my brain, and I use my brain for a lot of thoughts. If all of my standards are clear and in writing… I don’t have to use my brain to think about them at all!

It allows immediate adjustment. Without a sheet, I find myself making a decision I’m not happy I made and.. what am I supposed to do? I told myself I wouldn’t do this again last time, and then I did it again? With a sheet, I can update the rules, and make it clear that it’s not something I want to do. (If I find myself deliberately ignoring the rules, when I know they prohibit a behavior, that’s a different problem. But it hasn’t happened yet.)

This is also good for my happiness. When I make those decisions it’s easy to find myself in thought patterns like “I don’t want to be a person who does this.” But the sheet is literally a way to directly change the person I will be in the future. So it’s easy to deal with that shame in that way. (I’ll write about this some other day, but in general, I think it’s for the best if you just try to basically never feel shame. Unless it’s about something you can fix instantly.)

It allows permanency. My experience with previous good habits was that they worked great! Then something happened, and I hit a stumbling block. And everything collapsed. And I lost everything I had and didn’t remember it well enough to reattain the relevant insights.

What a system like this, that’s reliant on a specific set of actions to get me into the good place, does, is give me something I can recreate when things go awry.

(It’s not quite as useful as I want it to be for this, yet. I need to write more about what I will do when I get, e.g., sick into my rules.)

It enforces improvement over time. It’s impossible to be static without noticing it when I’m, day after day, recording where I’m at. (It’s also hard to be static when “reflect on my life and where I’m at is something I expect of myself regularly. It’s also hard to be static when I’m sharing the details of my life and self-improvement in a blog!)

~

Other sheets I have:

Nutrition/weight/sleep logging sheets

A ‘considerations’ sheet, for ‘I probably want to make this change but I haven’t thought it through well enough to actually commit to it`

My to-do list

A purchase justifications sheet

A sheet for listing “oh, I want to write about this”

My ‘Rules’ sheet, which mostly contains meta-rules for deciding the rules. But it also contains a place to list rules before I change them (I know my rules are imperfect; my current compromise is ‘I can change them if I write the change down 24 hours before I actually do it, and then update the sheet before breaking the original rule.’ It’s worked so far, and I expect this to continue)

~

Even more than the changes I’ve already made, I credit this spreadsheet for a lot of my general optimism about where I will be in a month or two or six or twelve. (not just the spreadsheet! Thank you to everyone who’s helped / is helping me!)

~

This is just one facet of what I do to help myself grow, and so much of it is instead actually about perspective. But the blog is also something that enforces improvement over time - it’s not like I’m going to keep rehashing the same things about me over and over again in a format like this.

(This isn’t isn’t a “how-to” post or a “recommendation” post, but I would recommend this. It would probably help. I was going to type “it would probably help if,” but, it would probably help.)

Did you have a nice day? If not, what are you going to do right now to change that for tomorrow?

It was nice to write this. And it feels nice to mark the little green X on my sheet for a blog post. 2 days down, 8 or more to go!