How to Track Habits Like an Expert with Challenger

By Challenger App Team

One of the most common mistakes people make when they try to stick with high-performance habits is not measuring their progress properly. That’s why they ultimately fail to stay on track. Here is a complete guide to help you track your habits the expert way.

Changing your habits is a great way to make important changes in your life that can lead to personal and strategic growth. But, as anyone who has ever tried to install new habits before, it can be challenging to maintain for the long term.

One important tool that is highly effective in helping people to develop new habits is habit tracking. If you don’t already know exactly how tracking habits can help you form new habits, read our article Why Tracking Habits is the key to Building Habits.

Today we are going to look at how you can track your habits in a strategic way. We will go through the overall principles of strategic habit tracking and also show you exactly how you can track your habits with Habitify.

Step 1: Decide what habits to track

John C. Maxwell once said:

“You’ll never change your life until you change
something you do daily. The secret of your
success is found in your daily routine.”

What habits we do undeniably shapes who we will be in the future. That’s why choosing what habits to develop is super important.

If you want to eat healthier, you should cut down on saturated fat and sugar for every daily meal, or if you want to be a runner, building a habit of running everyday is indispensable.

This step seems pretty simple, but it doesn’t mean it’s less important. To build your habits, the very first step you should work on is to develop a clear vision, come up with a plan with long-term goals, and then break it into small and achievable steps. Otherwise, you’ll be more likely to give up, or end up in sheer frustration.

To set such a clear goal, it should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. The harsh truth is, goal-setting is so hard, but you can avoid it by forestalling 3 Biggest Reasons Why We Hardly Achieve Our Goals here. For short, you can ask and ponder these questions yourself:

• What person do you want to be?
• What are your long-term goals?
• Why do you want to form this habit?
• How is this habit going to improve your goals?

Once you know exactly who you will be in the future, then you can manage yourself each day knowing what exact habits you should do as part of your big picture. Also remember, developing a clear vision creates your accountability, then you’ll be more likely to make new habits stick.

Step 2: Choose the habit tracking method

Now you’ve already known what habits you should follow, the next crucial step is to choose a right habit tracker.

The most common choices are bullet journal, habit tracker notebook, excel spreadsheet, or habit tracking app like Habitify.

Try to find the one that suits you best, rather than going with whatever you are recommended to. Habit tracking and personal development are personal, not universal.

If you are new to habit tracking, you can start with Printed Template or Notebook Habit Tracker, which has available templates to save considerable time and effort. If you would love to draw and create your own beautiful and inspiring template, maybe Bullet Journal fits for you. Or if you want to find a very simple and convenient way for tracking, try out habit tracking mobile apps.

Step 3: Choose the measurement unit

Most people never thought of this step: choosing the unit to track our habits. Why? The measurement you choose decides the direction of your growth, hence your results.

Take the habit of reading books for example. “Reading more” is too general an objective. Is it more books, more pages, or more time? Do you want to cover more knowledge, improve your reading speed, or simply just try to start a reading habit?

Different Key Performance Indicator , different strategies, and different results.

Since measurement units are important, Habitify has developed features to further assist you at this. Now you can set different measurements for different goals:

Step 5: Analyze

Once you master the habit of tracking habits, and have generated some good amount of progress statistics, the final step is to analyze your habits performance.

New to this? Let me explain.

If we wish to improve ourselves, we need to understand where we’re at first.

That’s why we always need to look back at our progress, and the best way to assess our performance is through statistics.

Habit metrics are really powerful when it comes to self-reflection. It allows us to go beyond the surface of whether we’re doing the habit or not, and gain deeper self-understanding, define factors affecting our behaviors, hence deriving realistic ways to improve ourselves.

If you’re feeling a bit overwhelming of what you’ve just read, don’t be. It might sound a bit complicated but we have designed Habitify to help you perform all those things in a simple yet effective way.

All you need to do is follow these three steps:

#1: Making sense of each key habit metrics

The very first step you need to know is truly understanding some key habit metrics to take an overview of your habit performance.

Want to explore more about the meaning of these metrics, you can read: Let Data Tell YOUR Story

#2: Interpret data to assess your habits

And as you interpret data, each daily, weekly, and monthly report can provide the insights you need to grow your habits.

#3: Making comparisons to unlock the most important habits

Once you can make improvement for your habit performance, the final step is to compare all your habit progress, and unlock your potential. The aim of this step is to achieve your long-term goal by reflecting the progress of all habits, then focus and give considerable effort on habits that have a huge impact on your goal.

Get started

Your habit-forming process is a never-ending journey with lots of obstacles outside. Hence, your life long goals need a strategy and constant evaluation. So, all you need to do is keep up the commitment, and constantly make improvements from what you have done.

With this article, we hope that you’ve got the tools needed to track your habits strategically in order to achieve your long-term goals. However, gathering the know-hows and the tools alone is never enough – you need to get off your duff and take action. Start tracking your habits with Habitify today, build your positive habits, then you will make a difference in no time.