The analog journal versus the digital habit tracker. Can these two tools coexist? How are they different? How are they the same? In this video, we'll explore the relationship between digital habit trackers and a good old-fashioned paper notebook.
In my case, the bullet journal. Hi, I'm Grider, the creator of the bullet journal method, and this is the third in a series where I'll be comparing digital and analog productivity tools. Doing something over and over again is really easy when you don't have to think about it.
And that's what habit trackers are for, to bring a behavior back. into our mind over and over and over again. You can download all sorts of habit trackers to your phone and carry them with you wherever you go. They promise to outsource part of the discipline that it takes to remain consistent in a variety of ways.
They can track your calendar, location, your steps, and even some of your biometrics, reminding you when you have to do what and where, transforming a desired behavior into a habit. In practice, Many habit trackers can do the opposite. The easier it is to track habits, the more habits we're likely to track. This can result in what I call habit hoarding. Spend enough time on social media and you'll find countless ways to improve your life.
All sorts of routines by people who inspire you. If they drink 10 cups of water a day, take 13 vitamins, get 10,000 steps daily, meditate, and write 2,000 words, then so should I. I've fallen prey to this mindset myself.
I've downloaded really slick apps with great intentions. In a few minutes, I was tracking a dozen habits that held the promise for better health, wealth, and relationships. The problem was that they never worked.
When the habits you're tracking don't track with your life, when they aren't immediately relevant to what you need, they're a little more than a distraction. So how do you figure out what behaviors need to be added or removed? Well, let's start with the principal habit to track your lived experience.
I do this using the bullet journal method. I use a notebook. or a pocket notebook when I'm on the go to track what I'm thinking, feeling, and doing throughout the day.
This results in a written record that I can study later on. Patterns begin to reveal themselves. If any of those things are moving me toward the life I want to live, great. Then I just need to keep doing those things.
If any of those things are moving me away from the life that I want to live, then something needs to change. You can then create a small set of useful behaviors you'd like to track. regularly to make changes.
Here's how. I see each notebook as another chapter in my life. At the beginning of that chapter, I set an intention based on who you want to be in this chapter of your life.
Let's say you have a young child and your intention is to have more energy and vitality in that relationship. I intend to increase my energy to allow me to be more joyful in my parenting. Once you've established an intention, you can break it down into a process. Small behaviors that create the possibility for having more energy.
Maybe it will be to walk for 30 minutes every single day before the family wakes up or to go to bed 30 minutes earlier or to replace 20 minutes of phone time with playtime with your kids. Some of us may have many things that are alive for us right now. I recommend sticking to the rule of three.
Start by writing down a list of all the behaviors you could add that have the potential to improve the quality of your conditions right now. Now pick the one that is most alive for you of the entire list and then do the process again and pick the next most important and then the third most important. You can either track three behaviors that serve one intention, like in our example, or three behaviors divided across three intentions, like to exercise, floss, and grow.
cook. Once we have three clear actions that are grounded in our intention, it's time to track them in our notebook. The bullet journal method includes a monthly ritual that prompts us to naturally reflect on the month gone by, using a timeline which features all the dates of the month, where we create a record of important events that happened during the month gone by. We can piggyback on this layout to set up a super simple action tracker. First, create a key with your three actions at the bottom of the page.
I use the first letter of the action as its bullet, and I write out the rest of the practice as a reminder for when I come back to this page in the future. Trust me, it's very easy to forget what you were tracking even a month or two later. Then, copy the key to the upper right corner of the page next to the month's name.
I put this on the inner edge of the page to leave room for calendar events on the left. Next, add action bullets under each habit for each day based on how often you want to complete this habit over the week. Only schedule that first week for now though.
Then, as the week goes by, mark any actions as complete as you go. This will help you see what you were actually able to achieve this week. So for week two, we'll revise our practice to match what's realistic for that week based on our lived experience. Then we keep repeating this process throughout the month.
This simple tracker helps tremendously as you can fine-tune your practice each week based on what you learn. You can also compare your habit success against what else was happening in your life during that month. So you can notice if there are patterns that impact your success. What's getting in the way?
If you're not sleeping, you're not going to be exercising. If you work too much, you're not going to be cooking. With this system of capturing intentions, logging daily thoughts, and tracking a small set of three relevant daily actions, I can create a sense of momentum and move towards what matters most to me. So do I recommend the use of habit tracking apps at all? If you found them to be helpful so far, then absolutely.
If you've never tried them before but are curious, be sure to get clear on why you're tracking, what you're tracking before you're tracking. What impact are you hoping that it has? That way you can avoid the trap of overwhelming or disappointing yourself through habit hoarding. Personally, I found that less is more.
Though not as convenient, I found that tracking most meaningful actions by hand to be more effective. It helps me to slow down and... think about why I'm doing what I'm doing and how I'm going about it to create rituals to become fully alive in what I do. If you enjoyed this video, watch the next in my series on digital versus analog tools right here.
Thank you for taking the time. See you in the next one. Happy bullet journaling.