Pro tip: I wasted 3 years writing daily habit trackers the hard way

I used to draw a full weekly tracker every Sunday night with separate boxes for water, steps, and reading. Then yesterday I noticed my friend just puts a single dot on his daily log and connects the dots at month end into a graph. Has anyone else realized they were overcomplicating their system way past the point of usefulness?

4 comments

4 Comments

rowan219d ago

Thought dots were lazy but connecting them into a graph actually shows real progress.

caleb_stone19d ago

Oh gosh, this reminds me of the time I spent a whole summer tracking my coffee intake. I had this color coded system with little symbols for pour over versus espresso versus cold brew. Turns out I was just drinking way too much coffee and the tracker was just showing me that in the most complicated way possible. A simple tally mark on the fridge whiteboard would have told me the same thing. Sometimes we get so caught up in making the system pretty that we forget what we were trying to learn in the first place.

patricia_green2113d ago

Tally marks on a fridge whiteboard? That's still way more effort than grabbing coffee deserves. Are we really turning caffeine intake into a life audit project now? Next someone will be color coding their trips to the bathroom.

clairem4713d ago

Oh man, my bullet journal month was basically the same thing but for my mood. I had all these little faces and codes for happy, tired, anxious, whatever, and a full color key. After three months I looked at it and was like, okay, this just says 'you are stressed out' in a really fancy way. You hit the nail on the head about making the system pretty. What helped me was just using a plain lined notebook and writing one or two words each day. It's less satisfying to look at but way more useful when you actually want to check back on how your week went.