My fav habit tracking method

hi y'all.

Idk if I've shared this before, but -

This is one thing I've unlocked this past year has been such a gamechanger, and I wanted to share.

Disclaimers: 

(1) I probably didn't come up with this, as I don't think I've had a single original idea in my entire life. But I still wanted to post about it because it has just been SO helpful for me.

(2) If you know I'm a psych student, dear reader, I need to clarify that I am NOT a counseling/clinical student.This is not professional advice. I do not possess any qualifications or knowledge that should deem any of my advice particularly reputable. While I have read some reasearch related to motivation and I like to think about the psychology behind these things, I am an amateur and this is an amateur project. Please keep this in mind.

If you're struggling with something that strongly affects your health, well-being and/or life expectancy, you should seek the advice of a professional, not randos on the internet like myself.

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So, basically. I'm not very good at doing things I'm supposed to. Specifically, I'm gonna expose myself later in this blog anyways, so I'll own it up front: I've struggled a lot the past few years with self care habits.

It may be a result of undiagnosed ADHD or something else, but it doesn't really matter. The fact still stands, I kind of suck at taking care of myself. I'm also bad at building new habits I wanna do in general.

And, I am also a child at heart and at...brain? Evidently.

So, without further ado, I present to thee...the habit tracker coloring sheet.

The overarching goal of this is to intrinsically motivate myself to build habits I'm not motivated to do for their own sake. 

To build habits, we need to engage in them consistently, which means we need to be continually motivated to engage in them. A lot of what gets in the way is that knowing that we "should" do something often isn't enough to get us to do it. That's because that normative "should" type of motivation is external motivation - stronger motivation is internal.

I think this approach also helps eliminate some of the all-or-nothing mentality that I, and I think a lot of people, tend to default to when trying to make a personal change.

How it works:

1. The coloring page. I found a free coloring sheet online. You'll want to match the level of complexity to the length of time you roughly want to spend trying this (but keep in mind that these tend to take much longer to do than you'd think).

Coloring sheets that are less detailed will probably only last you a couple of weeks; adult coloring books, depending on complexity, can easily take months. It depends on how often you'd ideally do whatever it is you're planning on doing. I like using mosaic-style coloring sheets, I've found. 

Bonus if the coloring sheet happens to be somehow related to your goals (I'll get to those more below), but most ideally, you should find it interesting and nice to look at :)

2. The habits. I make a list of the habits I want to assign to the coloring sheet. This could be any habit you're trying to build into your daily/near-daily routine; or it could just be any task you know you need to do but have no motivation to do. Make sure your list isn't so long you can't keep track of all your habits. I'd recommend around 7 max, but you might do more if they're connected with each other (mine has 11, but a lot of them are related to one another in some way or tend to occur together, which makes them easier to remember).

I've made the one pictured a very general "things I'm not good at doing consistently/am usually not intrinsically motivated to do" coloring sheet, but I have a separate one for tasks related to my thesis, too.

What you do with the habits!

For each habit, I like to assign a distinct color.

Each time I do "the thing", I color in one section of the coloring page that color.

The beauty of this approach is that, unlike some habit trackers, where you might have a deadline to meet, or blank spaces if you didn't do that one thing on Tuesday, there's no visible evidence of your "failure" to do things perfectly and consistently at all times, or external pressure to do the thing to a certain "ultimate" standard.

The thought is that, if we reward our own persistence over our consistency/perfection, we're more likely to form the habits we want to form by continually doing them anyways: if the persistence/perseverence comes first, then motivation and more consistency will follow.

At the same time, we still get a hit of dopamine when we do something we are supposed to by filling out a little part of our coloring page soon after we engage in the target behavior (or knowing we will get to later, if we can't immediately get around it).

It's a visual representation of the process, too - as we progress, our habits grow stronger, and meanwhile, the coloring page gets colored in more and more. Seeing that is encouraging!

Plus, it's just more fun. It's pretty. It's cute. It's whimsical. You don't have to color in that one, specific box; you can choose your own adventure a little bit, and be creative with it.

Eventually, if I reach a point where I've colored in everything I want to be a certain color, I'll shift to using another color (or just any color I feel like using) when I do the thing, so that I'm still tracking it. In the end, I do want my coloring page to "make sense" and be pretty :) it's also just difficult to get the "right" colors for things towards the end if you don't grant yourself that flexibility.

I've found that assigning a distinct color for each thing helps me notice general patterns in what I'm not super great at doing, or what I'm more consistent about. This time around, I've learned I suck at remembering to floss.

But you could totally just use any color you feel like as you go, if you don't really care about tracking this. It's your coloring page, do what you want! 

However, I do still think there's another aspect to assigning colors that is helpful - namely, coloring things in so that you aren't doing one component at a time might make continual progress more likely. This is because you'll see that an element of the picture (in my case, the fish, the water, the seaweed/kelp/whatever it is...) isn't fully colored in, and you want to finish it!! If you finish one element at a time, you might feel a sense of completion/resolve from doing so, and be less motivated to continue coloring in the rest of the page. I have no idea if this is actually true, though - this is just a hunch.

A note about what makes a good "habit":

Ideally, good habits for this are:

- Reasonably doable/not too lofty. If you want to start running regularly, you might want to let yourself just do 20 minutes of running, rather than 5 miles.

- Clearly defined. You should be able to definitively tell yourself whether you engaged in the target behavior. Otherwise, you run the risk of blurring boundaries and marking down a habit as done when it really wasn't done to your standard - that isn't going to actually help you build the habits you are wanting to build, and it might even undermine your own feelings of accomplishment as a result. It helps to ask yourself questions like, "if I did this halfway/poorly, does it still count?" Your answer likely lies in the larger goals you have in building that habit, and what you already are doing. For example, one of my habits is "skincare". I define that as using as many of my typical skincare products as my skin would be able to handle - so throwing on just some moisturizer doesn't count in my book. Similarly, for washing my face, I need to use soap for it to count - just a cloth with water or makeup remover does not count in my book, just because I've already done that a lot of the time, and I know I'm capable of doing more. You'll also want to consider whether a habit might fall into multiple categories - e.g., my "doing one brave thing" might also be a "school to-do" - I've opted to not count it as both, but it could be a function of making the prior goal extra rewarding, if you wanted to take that route.

- At the same time, it can't be *too* "easy". Odds are this won't happen often, if you're trying to build a habit, there's a good chance it is difficult for you to do. "Easy" is in quotes, because, logically, brushing my teeth isn't physically difficult for me, but it's hard to get myself to do it consistently. This is also somewhat connected to clarity - if you don't clearly define what constitutes completing the task/habit, you might cut yourself too much slack. Then, you aren't really doing what you set out to do anymore.

- Not (typically) contingent on something else - on you doing something, or some external influence beyond your control. Of course, you likely can't go to the gym if there was a blizzard or you wreck your car, but in most typical cases, whether you can go is probably in your control. But if something outside of your control repeatedly, or more often than not, threatens your ability to complete the habit, you're no longer tying the reward of marking it complete to your own behavior.

- Somewhat relatedly, it needs to be a "root" habit - not a behavior that always depends on something else you are already not good at doing. If you're bad at doing something that a habit you want to build is contingent on, then that other thing is the habit you probably need to change first. Otherwise, you are going to fail more often/become discouraged. I can't fold my laundry if I don't actually wash it in the first place. I can't wash my hair if I don't shower. Etc. - make sure you've found the "root" of the things you want to change.

Whether a given habit meets all these criteria is REALLY HARD to figure out initially, so it's important to let yourself create an initial list that seems good, try it for a couple of weeks, and give yourself permission to tweak the habits you assign if you notice something isn't working. The whole point is to be able to make progress on these habits, and if they aren't attainable, then it misses the point. So don't feel bad if your list of habits doesn't flawlessly meet these criteria the first time you make it.

Here's an example of a habit that didn't work from my own experience: I made a habit called "stick to my schedule", because I'm really bad at doing what I am supposed to do in a given day, and it affects my ability to be productive as a student. I think I filled this out exactly twice in the course of two months, until I changed it into two separate habits. 

Here's why that habit didn't work:

- It was too lofty - days are long. If I forget to do something, or if a single task takes too long, I wasn't allowed to check it off. This made this goal incredibly difficult to satisfy.

- It was contingent on things outside of my control. Sometimes a more urgent task came up that I couldn't have known about (or really, just forgot about, I'm human...). Sometimes there was a traffic jam I didn't predict. Etc. Shit happens, and for this particular goal, shit happened far too often. This led to, again, not being able to check it off despite my best efforts of completing it.

- It wasn't a "root" habit - to be able to stick to my schedule, I had to make a schedule in the first place. Since I was not consistently doing this, I couldn't say I had stuck to my schedule, no matter how productive I had truly been that day (which was the whole point of this habit), because my "schedule" didn't even exist.

- Because of these issues, trying to keep this goal despite them led to the clarity/easy issues I mentioned, to some degree - I decided since it was too lofty, I had to soften my standards somewhere if I was to keep it on the list. So, while I didn't ultimately satisfy the original definition of the habit, I had to ask myself if sticking to my schedule "technically" counted if I had given myself an open Saturday to do whatever I wanted whenever I felt like it. Etc. This ultimately led to the habit becoming pointless.

Essentially, it wasn't fixing the problem I wanted to fix, and it required the stars basically aligning for it to actually get marked off. It therefore did not work.

How I solved this:

It took a lot of reflection, but I realized the root issues of this behavior I wanted to change were actually two-fold: (1) my inability to plan out my days in advance and (2) my tendency to avoid and procrastinate things I found unpleasant or intimidating.

...and technically (3), my inability to realistically predict how long things take in the first place, but that's not really habit-based, and connects more to the loftiness issue I had mentioned earlier. I shouldn't be punishing myself for what equates to a skill issue, rather than a motivational/action-based issue.

So, I created two habits in the place of this one: (1) "check my planner" (meaning, go over the following day and plan what I am going to do) and (2) "do one brave thing" (meaning, override my monkey brain and consciously choose to do something I know is good for me/necessary that I want to avoid or put off). The latter is actually one of my favorite goals/habits I've come up with to date, because it gets at the root of one of my deepest personal issues.

The irony is that I am writing this blog when I should be writing a paper...so I still clearly have some room for improvement. Lol.

3. Location. Put this coloring sheet, and whatever you're using to color in the spaces, up somewhere near where you complete the task and/or somewhere highly visible for you.

In my case, since most of my tasks are self care related and I'll end up in my bathroom at least a couple times a day, I've put it above my bathroom sink.

I've found this helps to serve as a visual cue that I'm trying to build these habits. The page being in an area you personally frequent increases your exposure to that cue (and you can continually check in with yourself about whether you need to update it!). Keeping your desire to change and build habits to the front of your mind might help you prioritize it more.

For the coloring page for my thesis, I had put the page in my folder, because I felt some self-consciousness about having it up in my office, but I quickly learned it was out of sight, out of mind for me - I wasn't very motivated to fill it out. Having it next to where I work has made me more likely to want to prioritize doing something, anything to nudge my thesis along so I can color in another space on my little page.

It being proximal to where you tend to complete your tasks (or at least some of them) might also serve as a nudge that "oh, I'm right here, I could go ahead and do the thing". Less opportunity to get distracted between setting out to do the thing and doing it, etc.

I like having the list of habits and their colors next to it, but that's up to you - I'm not so sure it actually makes a difference, but for me, it lessens some of the cognitive load with figuring out what I can color in and remembering the color I've made it (and I'm open with my roommates about the fact that I am an absolute gremlin and struggle with self care, so I personally don't care if they see it). You could also have the list of habits tucked behind the coloring page, somehow, or posted on the back, if you prefer to keep them more hidden but still accessible. A note on your phone could help, too.

I also put a little motivational note up there with it for good measure - "what you practice grows stronger" - but that is, of course, optional :)

4. (The best part!) The reward. You know how stores use punchcards to get you to come back, and once you complete one, you get a reward? I use this kinda like that. I promise myself that once the coloring page is full, I get a reward - either buying something for myself I really want, or doing an extra special activity I don't typically make time for that I'll find rewarding.

Ideally, this reward should be intrinsically interesting and rewarding to you - it should bring you genuine joy. Things that you would get just because everyone else has it, you just feel like you "should" have/do it for some reason, or some other motivation that is positioned outside of yourself, doesn't really count. It also might feel more meaningful to you if your reward is somehow tied to your goals.

Some rewards I've done in the past: perfume I'd been wanting for months (but was more expensive to justify normally); some specific nail polishes I found really cute; a specific herb plant I'd wanted to try to grow; a special type of tea I really like. This time around, I'm planning to get a secondhand CD player!

I've done both "a purchase of $X" and buying a specific thing, and I do find the latter more motivating, I think because it's easier to visualize in my mind. There's also some psychology behind doing work for a "primary resource" (something that directly fulfills a need/desire, like food, etc.) being more motivating than working for a "secondary resource" (such as money that is then used to buy the thing). That likely comes into play here. I imagine a special activity (provided it is something relatively turnkey and again, intrinsically desirable to you) is also viable here, if you don't want to get a physical item.

It should enrich your life in some way, but note that your reward does not have to be particularly elaborate or expensive to be special! Going the extra mile for yourself does not always have to mean spending more money. If you're like me and you're on a budget, it's totally fine to limit whatever you're choosing as your reward to a certain dollar amount. As long as it is something extra special you enjoy that sticks out from your day-to-day norm, it should still be rewarding and motivating.

All this to say, the end goal can totally be subject to change, too! If I decide in the process of doing the coloring page that I no longer care about the thing, or am itching to buy/do another thing more, I've swapped the end goal before. Sometimes things cease to be viable, for one reason or another. This is competely okay! If you no longer care about the end goal you've chosen for the coloring page, you're probably less likely to do the thing, so it matters more that the promise at the end of the tunnel is truly motivating and desirable to you than it does to keep the end goal the same.

Writing your reward down next to the coloring sheet might be more motivating, but I haven't tried this yet myself. Given the above, maybe do it in pencil or using a sticky note, so it can be easily changed :)

5. A note about deadlines. Once upon a time, I thought putting a deadline on completing the coloring page would be motivating for me, but I no longer endorse that. 

For one, counting out the spaces in a coloring page is difficult and tedious. It's frankly a pain in the ass.

But, the bigger reason: when we want to build new habits, odds are that our progress is not always going to be consistent or linear. You'll have bad days; you'll fall off. It's human, and it doesn't mean you're done for, or that you've failed and should give up. It's quite the opposite. 

If you have a deadline, and fall off "too many times", and can no longer meet the deadline, you might think "well, what's the point? I failed. I give up". We don't want that!! Getting back up and starting again is what matters, maybe more than anything, when we want to build new habits.

I've also gone through the trouble of devising a "reward gradient" of sorts before, where if I got the picture done by an earlier deadline, I got a higher "tier" reward. While this approach softens the blow of deadlines being all-or-nothing, there's still a likelihood that you'll feel like you failed a little for not meeting the highest standard you had set for yourself, and that is still demotivating (which, again, is not our goal here!). It's also, like counting the spaces, just a lot of fuckin work to figure out. So, I don't think I recommend this approach either.

You also might think, "Well, if I just set the deadline really far away, I won't have to worry about this." But I don't think this works well either. At least, for me personally, knowing I have time before a deadline typically encourages me to procrastinate on doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing, which isn't so good for getting myself to build a habit.

All of this is to say, something about putting a deadline on this activity also seems to externalize the motivation to complete the coloring sheet. Psych research in general says external motivation isn't as effective, and really, this should only be about doing something for yourself! Not meeting some external, and frankly arbitrary standard. Again, it's about getting back up again and putting in consistent effort, not being perfect.

For these reasons, I think having no hard deadline is actually preferable. For me, seeing an unfinished coloring page that I have to do things to fill in, and knowing there is a reward in it for me if I do, has been ample motivation.

So...that's basically all I've got to say on this for now. If you do try it, let me know how it works out for you :)