One of the staples of bullet journalling are habit trackers. There is just something so satisfying about ticking off a box at the end of the day and looking at that unbroken streak of your new (or old) habit. And as they say, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Habit trackers seem like the perfect solution for when you want to build or maintain a habit. Yet, they stopped working for me (if they ever really worked at all) and so I have finally stopped using them. Thankfully, I figured out better ways of making my new habits stick.

Over five years of habit trackers

I have started bullet journalling in 2018 and have never looked back. When I got my first dot-grid notebook and gave the method a proper try, something clicked. A planner, a journal, a commonplace book, and whatever else you need – in one place? Yes, please!

My bullet journalling has been evolving with me over the years and changing according to my needs, but one thing was repeating itself year after year: habit trackers. It’s one of the Bullet Journal staples. When you search for Bu-Jo habit trackers, you will find thousands of beautiful, artistic habit trackers that people make. Mine were not of that kind. I would simply make a grid with days of the month on the vertical and all the habits I wanted to stick to on the horizontal. Nothing fancy. And then I would just go on crossing them off. For the most part.

I tracked all kinds of things over the years. Eating according to my plan, going to bed before 10, exercising, taking supplements, writing, avoiding social media, meditating, even journalling itself.

A selection of some of my (very not fancy) habit trackers over the years. Just look at the amount of blank (or black) squares!

What habit trackers are supposed to do

I can’t back this up by any data, but I think habit trackers are one of those things virtually every bullet journaler uses. We all want to stick to our good habits, get rid of the bad ones and create new ones. Habit trackers are meant to help with that. I believe the idea is for them to work serving these 3 main purposes:

1. Reminders

They serve as a reminder of what you have set out to do, so that you do not forget about it.

2. Motivation

They are meant to work as motivation. “You will not want to break your streak!” I have heard/read so many times. (Spoiler alert: that one didn’t work for me.)

3. Overview

They give you an overview of how well you did sticking to your habit, so that you can fix and tweak things if it isn’t going the way you want it to.

It all sounds so good on paper, and yet.

Habit trackers didn’t work for me

Looking at my habit trackers over the years, there are just so, so very many blank squares. I am not sure if I managed to make a single routine become a real habit, they way brushing my teeth is. You know, where you don’t have to track it or force it. Heck, you don’t even have to think about it all! It’s just a habit.

I would say that while habit trackers still worked as reminders and to provide overview, they failed at the most important bit. They failed to motivate me to actually do the thing.

What made me first question my habit trackers was a video of Tony Robbins talking about quitting smoking. “Why would you count the days since you last smoked? Is it just to know how long you lasted this time?” (I’m paraphrasing hard here.) That one really hit home for me. Here I was, starting and restarting my count of how many days I have managed without sugar. Over and over again, hundreds of times over several years. Pages and pages of habit trackers, were I would put a red square for a day when I achieved my goal and a black one for one when I didn’t. There were way too many black ones, staring back at me like little dark wells of misery.

After this call out, I sat down and thought and journalled about it. Why was I even tracking my no-sugar days? I don’t track the brushed-my-teeth days after all. I wanted my way of eating to be a part of me, and it really already was in many ways. Except for the moments I would give in and eat candy that I knew would make me sick. And so I decided that was it. I decided then and there that I simply wasn’t someone who eats that stuff anymore. Not now, not ever. No need to track. And somehow, miraculously, it worked. (Now, while this mindset shift was an important part of it, my sugar addiction took more than that to overcome. I previously wrote a blog post about sugar and another blog post about how hypnosis turned out super helpful.)

Diet was the first thing I stopped tracking, but I didn’t really extend that to my other habits at first. I thought those were somehow different and so I continued to dutifully track them. But the seed of doubt had been sowed. I started to realise, that just like with sugar, I wasn’t really sticking to my other habits either. I believe there were three main reasons.

1. Habit trackers leave too much space for failure.

Deep in my mind, somehow, quite stupidly, the fact that I can leave that little square blank, opened up for the possibility to do so. After all, nothing much happened if I did. It’s as if the whole process just reminded me that there was a real possibility that I wouldn’t do what I set out to do. It’s a bit hard to explain, but I feel like you probably know what I mean, and if you don’t, then lucky you.

In addition to that general possibility of failure, it also made one day the smallest time frame that mattered. This isn’t a problem for habits you are trying to establish, but for the ones you are trying to get rid off… Oh boy! For me this meant that if I had a cookie in the morning, well, then the whole day was “ruined”. The little blank square was to turn black anyway and I might as well eat all the other things I didn’t intend to eat! Not good.

2. Habit trackers create pressure.

The moment I start “messing up” and breaking my streaks, the two purposes that habit trackers still do, namely reminders and overview, turn sour. The gaps in the previous days bring up feelings of guilt and the daily reminder just feels like pressure. Things that I want to do, even the ones that I do for my own enjoyment, suddenly seem like chores. There is pressure. Some people react positively to pressure. Some people will be motivated by challenges, by pushing themselves, by turning things around. Some other people are more rebellious, and being told what to do doesn’t sit so well with them. Even if the person commanding is their past self. After years of thinking I was the first kind, I am coming to terms with my very present and very real rebellious streak. Being pressured definitely makes me want to do the thing less, not to mention it creates (often unnecessary) stress.

3. Habit trackers don’t address the source of our habits.

As much as we would like to think that creating a new habit is as easy as just sticking to the activity (or sticking to not doing something), there are usually reasons for why we do (or don’t) do something. More often than not, we aren’t even aware of what these reasons are. They usually have something to do with fulfilling our needs: needs for feelings of safety, connection, rest, attention, stimulation, … Even the worst habits are fulfilling a need somewhere, somehow, albeit in a far-from-ideal way. Habit trackers on their own do nothing to help us address this need. And until we do, it will feel like a wall between us and the desired habit. One that we will keep running into until we acknowledge the need and fulfil it in some other way.

What I do instead

I was figuring out all that wasn’t working as I was watching one of my other desired habits falling by the wayside day after day. I was trying to establish a daily writing habit. I started writing a novel last November (NaNoWriMo anyone?) and I am still at it. I greatly enjoy it, but it has been difficult to actually do it. I never quite feel like it until I get into the flow, and I need a bit of peace and quiet, which is hard to get with small kids around. Anyway, I really, really, really wanted to establish a daily writing habit. At first I even had word-count goals, that I kept reducing (1000 words, then 400, 200, then any words). I just wasn’t writing most days. At all.

When I realised my habit trackers weren’t working, I decided to ditch them. But I knew I had to replace them with something. This is what I came up with. And this is what got me writing every day ever since (it’s just been a few weeks, but that’s longer than ever before).

Identity shift

Our habits are a reflection of who we are, but at the same time, we become what we do habitually. It’s a two way process. Our identity shapes our habits and our habits shape our identity. Identity <=> Habits

Habit trackers help us go in the direction from habits to identity: do -> be. The only thing you need to do to establish a habit is just to stick to the activity enough times. 21 days, some say. More, say others. I don’t know. I have stuck to some things for 2 or more months, just to then abandon them and watch my little habit tracker boxes remain empty.

Our identity is like a thermostat. It works to bring us back to who we believe we are, because it is uncomfortable to stray away from it. Establishing a new habit that challenges that identity is difficult. You have to fight it until you prove to yourself that you aren’t who you thought you were and your identity changes. This is the difficult direction. It’s much easier to go the other way, from identity to habits. If you manage to change your identity, the new habits feel so much more natural and easy.

This is what I uknowingly did with my sugar-eating habit. I managed to turn myself into someone who “just doesn’t eat that”. Beating my sugar addiction definitely took an identity shift, although it wasn’t all it took. It was a long process with many steps (including hypnosis, as I mentioned before), but then again, it was a pretty big thing to deal with as well.

On the other hand, my “writer’s block” (can you even call yourself a writer before you have properly started writing?) turned out to be an easier problem.

When I realised I wasn’t writing despite my daily reminder in the form of an empty checkbox, I decided to sit down and figure out what was stopping me. As usual, I did that in the form of journalling. I wrote down how I was feeling about writing, what I was afraid of, what I wanted to do. I realised I was a bit afraid of committing. Signing up to write every day, from now until forever, no matter what, felt like a big commitment. And so I kept putting it off, telling myself I was just waiting for the right moment. As if that wasn’t enough, I also had some doubts about whether I should be writing at all. It was mostly the usual: “it’s probably all just rubbish, very not good enough and not worth wasting time on”.

Seeing on paper these thoughts that I didn’t even know I was thinking was the key to addressing them.

I know there is no point in waiting for the right moment to start, if what I am starting is to be a life-long habit. I will expect myself to do it on bad days, good days, as well as the worst days, and I will need to make that decision over and over again, day after day. It doesn’t matter how I feel on the first day. It doesn’t matter how “perfect” that first day is, it won’t make it any easier to do it on day 400.

I have to admit that thinking about it made me quite nervous and it exposed the uncertainty I was feeling about the whole thing. I also only then realised that I did not actually commit to that habit yet! I was so afraid of failure that I was stopping myself from starting at all. Now I was facing that fear head-on and could decide what to do with it. I had a chance to actually examine what I wanted and why and what I was willing to do for it.

I told myself that my writing doesn’t have to be good as long as I am having fun with it. It’s a hobby after all! And besides, as the author, I am the last person qualified to judge how good my own writing is, so I might as well stop thinking about it. The most important thing was acknowledging that writing feels meaningful to me, that I really want to do it, and that I feel that it is worth it. In the end, I was still nervous, but I was determined. That is the day I became a writer, i.e. “a person who writes”. And I have been writing since. No habit tracker needed.

Make a Visit

When I actually faced the reality of what it meant to commit to a daily habit, and how big of a deal that actually was, it was very clear to me that I would need to make the goal as small as possible. All those word-count goals I had in the beginning did not leave any space for future me to make in-the-moment decisions. It is absolutely inevitable that there will be days when I won’t have time for 1000 words. Maybe not even 50 words. Will I inevitably have to break the word I gave myself, bringing on the feeling of guilt and failure with it?

Thankfully, I ran into the idea of a Visit-based organisation by Kourosh Dini (which I mentioned in a blog post about burnout before). It’s quite simple. You don’t schedule a task, you schedule a Visit of the task. A Visit means that you sit down with the work and consider it with your full attention for at least the time it takes to take a single deep breath. Then you decide whether you will work on it, and if yes, you remain with it for as long as makes sense then and there.

It might sound like a semantic difference only, but it really isn’t. The Visit is a powerful tool for creating space for a task, without making it an obligation. It lets the future you make decisions about a situation that the present you knows nothing about, without any guilt. And it allows the present you to make the commitment with good conscience.

Journal about goals and process

While I stopped using habit trackers, I still keep a list of the habits I want to consciously maintain or introduce, as reminders. But there are no check-boxes next to the items. It is simply a list I can review whenever I need to remind myself of what I have committed to.

There is a saying that you can’t improve what you do not track, and I definitely think there is some truth to it. That doesn’t mean though, that a habit tracker is necessarily the right thing to track with. Instead of ticking a box, I have started to journal about my goals and my days much more than I used to. I reflect on how I feel about my habits and my progress. I ask myself what I did that day/week/month to move towards my goals; what works and what seems to be missing. There are no unticked boxes making me feel guilty, or making me feel pressured, but I still get to see how things are going. It takes longer, so I don’t do it every day, but it provides me with much more information than a habit tracker ever would, and it allows me not only to have an overview of if my habit is sticking, but also gives ideas about why.

You do you

Habit trackers are super popular in the journalling community and I am sure they work perfectly for many people. If they do for you, that’s amazing, and there is no need to change a winning formula. Or if you don’t feel the need to use habit trackers, or work on creating habits at all, that’s great too! (In that case, I am surprised you have read this far in a post about habit trackers, but you are of course welcome to :) ) But if you do use habit trackers and struggle with establishing habits, I hope you found some interesting bits here, or at least realised that there are other options you can experiment with.