This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
In September 2016, Konrad Kopczynski — who happened to be the guest on episode #465 of the SuperDataScience podcast — introduced me to the idea of daily habit tracking.
I appreciate that it’s easy to throw around an expression like “life-changing”, but tracking my habits every day really has been a dramatically life-changing experience. When you wake up every morning and report honestly to yourself on whether you did or didn’t perform a particular good or bad habit yesterday, you open up your eyes to who you really are in a way that our minds otherwise trick us into ignoring or exaggerating.
Think you might drink or smoke more than you’d like to? In my experience, you can almost effortlessly attenuate bad habits like these simply by tracking daily in a spreadsheet how many servings of alcohol you had or how many cigarettes you smoked on the preceding day.
Want to be more productive? Use a timer to track how many hours of deep, uninterrupted work you complete each day.
Want to figure out what behaviors leave you feeling energized and happy? Simply track your mood on a daily basis while simultaneously tracking the behaviors that you suspect might be related to your mood such as how many hours you slept the night before, how many drinks you had before bed, or whether you got some exercise the day before.
From that day in 2016 that Konrad showed me his habit-tracking system, I’ve been gradually engineering myself more and more into the person that I wanted to be. Prior to 2016, sure I wanted to get more done and I wanted to get more sleep, but week after week would pass in which I’d yet again stay out late a few nights a week, not getting the precious sleep we all need and then not having the time or energy to pick up that Deep Learning textbook I was so yearning to read or start learning that cool new open-source software package everyone was talking about. Thanks to the magic of habit-tracking, I now get to bed on time, barely drink, and pull off productivity feats I never could have dreamed of until recently–like releasing 104 podcast episodes per year on top of a full-time job!
At the start of a new year, lots of people make promises to themselves about how they’re going to be different this year in some way or other. For almost everyone, the motivation to maintain the new habit dies off within days or weeks. For me, and other people who rigorously track their habits, motivation isn’t much of a factor and the new habits we take on persist for as long as we’d like them to. On top of that, we don’t need an arbitrary date like January 1st to come around in order for us to decide on a new habit to begin tracking and adhere to. It’s equally as easy to start a new habit at any point in the year.
Over the years, I’ve tracked small numbers of habits and in my view what I think is now an excessive number of habits. Currently, I track 50 of them daily, though if you’re new to habit tracking I recommend starting small with just a couple of habits to track daily to ease into the ritual. Starting with today’s episode, I’ll recurringly use Five-Minute Fridays to showcase a habit I track and why I think it’s so valuable. Hopefully they’ll provide food for thought and perhaps you’ll even find that you’d like to track some of the habits I bring up yourself.
If you make your way to jonkrohn.com/habits22, you’ll find a bare bones Google Sheets template for tracking your habits in the same way I do. Every day of 2022 has its own column and every habit has its own row.
To add a bit of visual pizzazz to visualize whether you’ve hit a given habit on a given day, I’ve included two columns to the far left of the spreadsheet called min and max that allow you to configure for yourself an ideal performance on that habit. If you hit your habit target within that min and max range on a given day, the corresponding cell in the spreadsheet will turn green. Our overall goal is to have all of the cells on a given day light up green.
As a first example, many habits are binary: you either did it or you didn’t. Did you floss your teeth yesterday? Yes or no. In such a binary situation, you can set min to 0 and max to 1. If you didn’t floss your teeth, log a zero for that day and the cell will remain white. If you did floss your teeth, log a one for that day and the cell will turn green.
As a second example, maybe you’d like to limit yourself to no more than one serving of alcohol in a day. In that case, set the min to any value below zero and the max to one. If you have zero or one servings of liquor, the cell will be green. If you have more than one, the cell will turn white.
As a third and final example, if you’d like to be a bit more liberal and limit yourself to no more than four servings of alcohol in a day, leave the min at any below-zero value increase the max to four, and the cell will remain green as long as you don’t log five or more drinks.
If you’ve gone to jonkrohn.com/habits22 to check out my template, you’ll notice that there is one meta-habit right at the very top and that’s Complete Habit Tracking. This is the one habit that’s essential to habit tracking being effective: You have to track the habits as regularly as you can, ideally every single day. As a data scientist, mightn’t the missing data drive you crazy if you miss a day anyway?
All right, in a future episode we’ll continue onward from this meta-habit of Complete Habit Tracking to one of the other habits I track daily, starting with a morning habit.
In the meantime, if you’d like to brush up on habit tracking in particular or habits in general, I highly recommend James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. In addition, if you think you might prefer a physical journal instead of a digital habit tracking spreadsheet like mine, take a look at James’s simple habits journal.
Keep on rockin’ it out there folks and catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon!