Habit tracker: how to use, download template

Beautiful and simple Mushroom applique. Templates can be obtained for free. Details in my post here.

Greetings!

Ever since I decided to start groups on VKontakte, Facebook, and an Instagram page, I began to get confused, chaos appeared in my head, the fear of forgetting something, not being able to do something, which made me... procrastinate. I decided to somehow put things in order and found a wonderful idea in a book with the inspiring title “The Happiness Project. Dreams. Plan. New life" Gretchen Rubin - start a habit tracker. This is a new idea for me, but there are many people on the Internet who use and confirm the functionality of this idea. I suggest you print out the habit tracker and hang it on the wall - this is the most convenient option.

Purpose and principle of operation of the healthy habit tracker

The tracker is a diary, which is drawn up in the form of a table. Each column is a day of the week, month or year. In the lines on the side, write down the habits that need to be developed. Among them:

• balanced diet;
• learning new skills: languages, science, business, etc.;
• reading books daily;
• playing sports.

To achieve results, you will need to develop a daily habit. The tracker will remind you of classes and give you the opportunity to adjust your tasks.

The tracker's operating principle is based on the development of an unconditioned reflex. By repeating an action over and over again on a daily basis, a habit is developed. As a result, over time, the actions necessary to achieve the goal are performed unconsciously at the level of everyday affairs. Examples of daily habits include brushing teeth, hand hygiene, and eating.

Appearance of trackers.
It is difficult for a person to adapt only in the first month. After 7-10 days, a reflex begins to develop, and primary adaptation is completed. Makes it easier to plan and complete daily tasks. On average, it takes up to 2 months to form a habit.

Some ideas for daily/weekly healthy habits

• Early awakening
• Go to bed before 10 – 11 pm
• Read 20-40 pages a day
• Drink 8 glasses of water
• Meditation
• Sports 10 – 15 minutes (yoga, stretching, plank, running, pumping abs, etc.)
• Do a mini cleaning on Tuesdays and Saturdays
• Exercise for your eyes
• Drink tea without sugar
• Maintain/control posture
• Cold and hot shower
• Face/body care
• Devote time to hobbies (drawing, music, etc.)
• Learning a foreign language (learn “x” words)
• Walk
• Walk to work (at least a few stops)
• Power control
• Self-education (watch video courses, webinars)
• Get rid of the words of parasites
• Spend 30 minutes. – 2 hours of developing your own project
• Dedicate no more than an hour a day to social networks (unless work related to them)

Beneficial impact of the tracker

The tracker is useful for a person because it:

• motivates to achieve the desired result;
• reminds you of what needs to be done;
• allows you to speed up habit formation;
• helps to avoid breakdowns;
• facilitates the process of planning multiple tasks.

No failures

The tracker sheet can be hung in a visible place: the refrigerator or bedside lamp. This makes it possible to remember the need to conduct classes and regularly analyze the results obtained. Thanks to the table, the risk of procrastination and laziness is reduced, work is not postponed indefinitely.

Increased self-esteem

A day with set and accomplished goals improves your mood and promotes the development of positive emotions. A person becomes self-confident, gets motivated to continue doing things and achieve long-term goals.

Thanks to habit trackers, self-esteem increases.

Eliminate Multitasking

Keeping a spreadsheet allows you to gain or improve time management skills. People learn to make a schedule for the day, week, month or year, and strictly follow their schedule. Transferring the schedule to paper helps reduce the load on the brain, as a result of which the thinking process speeds up and a person concentrates on work more easily. His memory of matters is freed up, the speed of decision-making and analysis of information received during the day increases.

Speeding up your habit

A unique diary accelerates the formation of habits. To do this, a general list of tasks for short-term and long-term implementation is compiled. To increase your chances, you will need to check with it 2 times a day:

1. In the morning, preferably after waking up and washing your face, to remind you to complete tasks.
2. In the evening, before going to bed, to analyze the things done during the day, transfer thoughts to paper, and create a schedule for the next day.

Habit tracker – how does it work?

The habit tracker is based on the 21 day rule. This is the minimum repetition required for the action to become a habit. That is, only after you repeat the action 21 times in a row will it have a chance to gain a foothold on an unconscious level. Until then, we need an assistant who will regularly and unobtrusively remind us about the next glass of water, five minutes of planks and a spoonful of fiber.

The habit tracker and its functionality are simple, but the effectiveness is killer. There are plenty of worthwhile habit apps. Let's look at the most interesting ones for iOS and Android.

How to keep a habit tracker

Basic rules when keeping a tracker:

1. There is no need to write down all your wishes and goals for life. Even long-term goals should in practice be achieved within a year. Over time, desires, life position, and character change, so the tracker can be updated regularly.
2. Habits should be divided into categories: work, sports, self-development. This will make it easier to analyze the results and make it possible to evaluate the goals achieved.
3. Summarize the results after finishing the working day, preferably before going to bed. You should not engage in self-deception - passing off what you want as reality.
4. It is forbidden to set vaguely formulated tasks. Learning English in 3-4 months is an abstract goal. It is necessary to introduce strict restrictions - memorize 10 new words per day, learn a grammatical rule.

It is necessary to set clear goals.

Loop

Loop is an open source app for tracking your habit progress. Loop is much simpler than other applications for these purposes, thanks to its lightweight interface and more intuitive operating techniques. The app looks like a calendar where you can add habits and choose when to work on them. When you add a goal, you can choose a name, color, tracking preferences, repeat days, and reminders. If necessary, you can edit these settings at any time.

Once you create a habit, it will be added to the main screen of the program. It will also show basic information about it for the last five days. From here you can easily control everything related to your tasks by simply selecting the desired date. Clicking on a goal on the main screen will show more detailed data: skill strength, habit history, best results and habit frequency.

Version 1.8 introduced a new histogram showing the number of repetitions performed each week, month or year. Now completing habits on irregular workdays no longer breaks task progress. It's important to note that Loop doesn't have the ability to register an account to sync your data later, but you can download all the data in a CSV file and upload it back if needed.

Tracker ideas

The table can be divided into 5 main categories:

1. Sport. The fight against physical inactivity includes any physical activity: morning or evening jogging, gymnastics, dance classes, walking or cycling, swimming, planking, going to the gym.
2. Health and beauty. This includes a balanced diet, 8 hours of sleep, strict drinking regimen, and a low-calorie diet. You can include in your schedule the application of skin care products, bedtime, and wake-up time.
3. Household tasks. Carrying out wet cleaning, cooking, caring for pets.
4. Creative activities. Writing, memorizing poems, reading art books, drawing. Exercises with musical instruments.
5. Self-development. Daily reading of popular science literature, watching important news in the world, acquiring new skills useful for work, studying, learning foreign languages.

Tips for learning new habits

After drawing up an individual schedule, you must adhere to the following recommendations:

1. It is forbidden to develop a large number of habits in parallel. You need to concentrate on one, maximum two per month. Adapting to unusual things requires willpower and self-control. With a large number of goals, stress develops, laziness and procrastination appear. Therefore, you should not achieve difficult to achieve goals in a short period of time. If there is a failure, a drop in self-esteem, humiliation, apathy, and depression are possible.
2. Make time for the habit every day. It doesn't matter how long a person spends on a new task. There is no need to rush and force yourself to work towards your goal. You can increase your practice time only when you gain confidence in your own abilities.
3. The sheet must be in a visible place. It is necessary to look into it regularly, take short breaks to analyze tasks, and motivate yourself to work with long-term goals.
4. You should not engage in self-deprecation if you missed 1 day. During the adaptation period, this is within the norm. It’s worth calming down and rearranging your schedule if possible.

It is advisable to harmoniously fit new habits into the existing daily routine. In this case, they will reduce stress and help you complete your tasks faster.

How to Avoid Failures

The benefits of a healthy habit tracker cannot be underestimated, since this technique really increases a person’s chances of developing truly useful habits, which will later only help them live and achieve what they want with less effort. However, there are some nuances that should be mentioned separately.

Firstly, it concerns the possible overload of the tracker. Introduce habits into everyday life gradually, do not try to be in time everywhere at once. This way you will avoid a large number of failures and will not have to chase all the rabbits at once.

Secondly, do not be upset by possible failures. Not everything in life can be predicted, and some factors may make you forget about the tracker and the entries placed in it for some time. It’s another matter if this happens with enviable regularity - in this case you should think about the possible reasons and try to correct the situation.

Thirdly, to effectively use the healthy habit tracker, you will need to initially establish one useful habit: open the tracker every day, morning and evening, assessing upcoming tasks for the current day and summing up the past day. If you just write down a tracker table and abandon it, it will be useless.

Trackers for printing

To print out the finished table, make your plan for the week and indicate the prospects for the month and year. Then a template is formed. In the top line, as the header of each column, the days of the week and the days of the month are indicated. There is no need to type anything in the first column, because it is recommended to enter goals by hand. After all manipulations are completed, the finished table is printed and hung in a visible place.

If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl+Enter.

Day by Day

Last but not the worst app on our Day by Day list. Instead of relying on weekly results, this app focuses on daily exercise and measuring daily progress. You can create a new habit by simply clicking on the plus icon in the main menu. You can then add all the necessary information, choose a color and an icon for the habit tab. Once you've added a habit, you can assign yourself goals as you work on it.

You can track habits through the start menu, it shows the chronology of activities, achievements received, obligations fulfilled, etc. Starting from here, you can set the start and end dates for working on a habit - Day by Day will make sure that you do not shirk your work .

Yes, undoubtedly, there will be benefits from this, but you will see it only after 21 days or a couple of months. Therefore, in the application you can reward yourself, and therefore get more pleasure from working on strengthening your habits. The big advantage of this application is the improved system of rewards for efforts - you can independently indicate your reward for the work done.

All added information can be downloaded as a ZIP file. Unfortunately, the free version of the application allows you to add only two habits. The paid version removes this unreasonable limitation.