Track your habits

Mark your progress and you can get more done

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.
Good Morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to try tracking your habits. Checking in
each day on whether you've done what you intend to
do can be a helpful tool in achieving your goals.

(00:26):
Habit tracking has a long history. Founding father and self
improvement enthusiast Benjamin Franklin famously created a list of thirteen virtues,
such as frugality, moderation, and temperance. In his autobiography, Franklin
describes the habit tracker he created as a way to
visualize his progress. Each week, he drew a grid in

(00:48):
his note book with a column devoted to each virtue.
In the evenings, he considered whether or not he had
upheld each virtue. Over the course of the day, he
filled out the grid for that day accordingly. Now, despite
my admiration for Franklin, I will say that his virtues
were a wee bit vague. I think many of us
would benefit from tracking more specific habits, really behaviors. Maybe

(01:11):
it's keeping your daily spending under a certain amount. Maybe
it's reading to your children for twenty minutes, watering your
plants or walking ten thousand steps. All of these sound
more doable than just temperance, but vague or not, Franklin's
grid provides a lot of inspiration. Whether you use a
paper note booklet Franklin, or an Excel spreadsheet or an app.

(01:34):
Habit tracking can help keep you on track. I think
this happens for a few reasons. First, habit tracking can
help to increase the frequency of a desired behavior, simply
because the act of looking at your tracker each day
may remind you to do it. Second, a habit tracker
can motivate you to start and continue a habit streak.

(01:56):
Let's say you want to write at least five hundred
words every day. After a few days of adhering to
this habit, you'll start to see a chain of check
marks and your habit tracker. This can be extremely motivating,
and you can make a game out of seeing how
long a streak you can maintain. Third, tracking helps us
visualize how often we do things, and by giving us

(02:19):
hard data, we can take some of the worry and
emotions out of things. People are in general bad at
estimating how often they perform certain behaviors. This problematic estimation
can lead to broad pronouncements like I'm always on email
or I never play with my kids. But by putting
hard data down every day, you can gain a more

(02:41):
objective perspective. This can provide a surprising level of comfort
and reduce guilt. You may be on email a lot,
but you are not always on email, Or maybe you
feel you don't call your parents often enough. By tracking
that behavior, you may realize that you actually speak to
them on the phone far more often than you thought.

(03:03):
You see, you call them twice a week, and you'd
like to call them three times a week, so you
just mindfully pick up the phone a little more often
than you would success now, I would suggest limiting how
many habits you track. Even Benjamin Franklin knew that focusing
on too many habits at once would be overwhelming. He

(03:24):
chose to focus closely on one of his virtues each week,
rotating through the entire list four times per year. Similarly,
it can be helpful to choose a short list of
habits to track for a designated period of time, maybe
a week, maybe a month. When that period is up,
you can review your data and decide if you'd like
to track the same habits again or change things up.

(03:47):
Try filling out your habit tracker at the same time
each day, maybe before bed, and enjoy watching how your
behavior changes or for the good stuff remains steady. I'm
sure Benjamin Franklin would have a great aphorism to describe
this feeling, but I'll just say that progress is motivational.
A page full of check marks will nudge you on

(04:08):
to great Thanks. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks
for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Hey, everybody,
I'd love to hear from you. You can send me
your tips, your questions, or anything else. Just connect with

(04:29):
me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at Before Breakfast pod
that's B the number four, then Breakfast p o D.
You can also shoot me an email at Before Breakfast
podcast at i heeart media dot com that Before Breakfast
is spelled out with all the letters. Thanks so much,
I look forward to staying in touch. Before Breakfast is

(04:57):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H