Hey Team,
Today, I’d like to remind you that there can be value in tracking your progress when building or expanding a habit.
Not only can tracking show you patterns in your activities, it can help remind you that your efforts matter – long before you can observe any results.
Obviously, I’m going to a be fan of anything that reminds you that your efforts matter.
You can, of course, measure anything you want when tracking your habit-building process but please consider these two things:
1) pick a metric that interests you.
Most tracking systems involve counting workouts, reps, distance or time spent at an activity and those are all great things to track…if you care about those things.
However, you can track anything you want.
You can measure how good you feel after your practice or how your breathing changes as your habit progresses or differences in your sleep patterns or if specific activities make the muscle in your shoulder feel tense or relaxed.
You can track how many songs you listened to during your rehab exercises or whether you walk faster when listening to fiction or non-fiction audiobooks.
Anything that gives you interesting and/or useful information about your practice is worth tracking and can give you another reason to persist.
Sidenote: Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec have some intriguing approaches to personal data collection and art that may inspire you. Check out their Dear Data project or their book ‘Observe, Collect, Draw’
2) pick something that highlights your efforts rather than your results
While we often start new practices with a specific result in mind, we rarely have control of the timing and nature of our results.
We can, however, take charge of our efforts.
Sure, our capacity changes from day to day but we do what we can with the resources we have at a given time.
So, rather than just tracking our results, it makes sense for us to track our efforts and reward ourselves accordingly.
(Yes, our results will be rewarding too but results take a while to show up. Rewarding our efforts will be more consistently encouraging and will remind us that our efforts matter.)
So, when you choose something to track, please ensure you are recognizing/celebrating the work you are doing and how it is adding up over time.
That will be far more helpful to you than waiting for a big result before celebrating.
Obviously, I recommend celebrating your big results, too. That’s just a different part of the process than acknowledging your daily efforts.
Gold Star Time!
Here are a bunch of gold stars for your efforts today, no matter what you are measuring, how you are measuring it, or where you are in your habit-building process.
I wish you ease.
