My Minimalist Habit Tracker

My Minimalist Habit Tracker
Photo by Volkan Olmez / Unsplash
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In the US, more than half of adults who smoke try to quit each year. Fewer than 1 in 10 of them succeed.

Changing your habits is one of the hardest parts of making a permanent change.

In my last video I talked about some of my goals for the future, and some of how I structure goals and projects for those.

Now I will talk about a simple way I try to instill new habits to make sure I keep up with the day to day tasks that move me towards my goals.

I'm sure many of you, like me, have had bursts of motivation to make changes in your life, only to find that when that motivation runs out it's back to making the same old decisions, procrastinating instead of doing the things that really matter to you, and left with the feeling of having wasted your time.

To be clear, my intentions are not to shame or guilt you into action, or for taking rest. I myself am writing this on a Monday morning having just taken the entire weekend to do nothing but relax and a minimal amount of chores around the house.

My intent is to share some tips that will help you make time for positive behaviours, and consistently stick to them.

Enter the minimalist habit tracker - a tool that I use to inject fun and a sense of accomplishment into behaviour change.


The tool

The minimalist habit tracker I use is a Notion template developed by YouTuber and Notion expert Thomas Frank.

Excerpt from my Minimalist Habit Tracker

Simple and effective, it consists only of a list of checkboxes for each day of week.

Each week you can easily create a a fresh tracker by selecting the built-in 'New Weekly Habit Tracker' button (which is fully customisable, so if you are using same habits for several weeks you don't have to edit everything).

That just leaves you the task of doing the behaviours and recording what you achieve each day.

I recommend sticking to a maximum of 3 or 4 habits at a time, as any more may overwhelm you - causing more harm than good.

That explains what the tool is, now onto why it helps.


Why it works

According to Ali Abdaal in his book, Feel Good Productivity, there are a few ways people can overcome inaction to make habit changes.

  1. Motivation
  2. Discipline
  3. Unblocking

The brilliant analogy he uses to describe the three methods is to imagine that there is a stone stuck in your shoe and you need to go to your friends house for dinner.

How would each of the three methods tackle the situation?

1) Motivation

Using the dinner at a friends house would be your motivation - a positive reward waiting for you at the end of the task. You run in spite of the stone in your shoe hurting and possibly damaging your foot.

2) Discipline

With discipline, you run regardless of how you feel because you have made a commitment to do it. Once again, this may result in getting further hurt.

3) Unblocking

The final method looks to tackle the root cause of the pain - the stone in your shoe. Instead of using the above two methods, which can be difficult and unreliable (not to mention harmful), we identify and tackle the root cause of the problem.

This may take some reflection and self-awareness on our part, but is a more thorough way of getting to the real cause of any pain or fear that is preventing us from taking action.

  • Are you procrastinating rather than finishing that report?
  • Are you putting off having a difficult conversation with a partner or family member?
  • Do you regularly feel like you don't want to go to the gym after signing up for classes?

Ask yourself why this me be the case, and keep asking why until you arrive at the root cause. Once you understand the root cause you can look to solve the main issue.

In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
- James Clear, Atomic Habits

I myself am trying to be more healthy by eating keto-friendly foods only and walking 10,000 steps per day, but some days I have found it really hard to stick to those targets.

Asking myself "why" led me to realise that on days where I am particularly stressed and feel like I am lacking time, I am much more prone to caving to cravings, my motivation wanes, and my discipline all but disappears.

Now that I know, I can take actions to address the main issue (being overwhelmed, stressed or anxious by workload), rather than using pure motivation and discipline, which are not sustainable.

Next time you find yourself putting something off, ask yourself:

What's the stone in my shoe?


Changing habits is hard, and I hope that using the unblocking method will help you address the root cause of your issues, rather than relying on motivation and discipline, which will not only be inconsistent, but will needlessly suck the fun out of your tasks as you strive to hit your goals.

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Thanks friends, and see you soon.

Jack