“Research has shown that people who track their progress on goals like losing weight, quitting smoking, and lowering blood pressure are all more likely to improve than those who don’t. One study . . . found that those who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not. The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it.”
-James Clear, Atomic Habits
Build Healthy Habits
In his best-selling book, Atomic Habits, author James Clear defines a simple 4-step framework to build healthy habits:
Cue: Time
Craving: Location
Response: Preceding event
Reward: Emotional state
With this system in place, we can set up a routine to keep on loop:
Cue: Wake up every week day at 6am
Craving: Start morning run at a particular location
Response: Following up the run with stretches and a healthy breakfast
Reward: The end goal of every behavior: feeling the dopamine rush after completing the run
There’s a problem though. Anytime we try to build a healthy habit, or quit an unhealthy one, it’s easy to lose accountability over time without having some way of monitoring this progress. This is why having a way to track our progress is essential.
Breaking The Chain
If you’ve ever tried to monitor your progress to reach a goal, you may have heard of the “don’t break the chain” strategy: when our brains start to see the progress of something being tracked, we naturally will do our best to avoid breaking that chain. Having a visual representation of the chain makes it easy to keep track of our progress. Our brains are wired to keep ourselves from breaking the chain at all costs.
Habit tracker daily entries streak.
Enter the habit tracker: a simple way to visualize your habits. The main thing to look for in a habit tracker is a simple way to visualize your progress and incentivize reward for avoiding “breaking the chain”.
Tracking Progress
The irony of building a habit tracker app ourselves is that we needed it to monitor our own progress to keep our health in check during the intense 12 week development sprint. Making sure we hit targets such as at least 7 hours of sleep, 30+ minutes of exercise daily week over week, and keeping our stress levels in check were essential. Using our own habit tracker at the same time while building it helped us know exactly when we needed to catch up on our sleep, spend more time getting exercise, or lower our stress levels by getting away from the computer.
Metriport’s weekly insights.
After launching Metriport, we began to use it for other things such as breaking bad habits. As we both needed a break from caffeine after getting burnt out from the development sprint, we began using the app to monitor our progress with caffeine withdrawal. We set up daily prompts asking “did you avoid coffee today?”, with a simple yes or no answer. Every time we logged a “yes”, a visual cue showed up on a beautiful bar chart, making it easy for us to stay inspired to keep this up each day. When a “no” was logged, it was painful to look and see that we’d slipped and gotten away from our goal of logging a full week without coffee.
Improving Results
You could apply this same logic to quitting smoking, for example. By keeping a streak going with daily entries, it becomes motivating seeing the progress. You’re less likely to slip up and smoke if you’ve already logged a successful 13 days without cigarettes, and are reminded of this every day you open your habit tracker. Take this logic and apply it to any other habit you’re trying to put down: sugar consumption, gluten intake, alcohol addiction, compulsive spending… you name it.
“Perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.”
-James Clear
The best part of using a habit tracker is that it motivates you to continue on your self improvement journey. An even better way to stay motivated is to share your progress with others. While pen-and-paper methods such as a bullet journal can work, the beauty of using a habit tracker app is that you don’t have to spend much time logging entries, seeing progress, and sharing that progress with others. In addition to this, one reason we built Metriport with the goal of making the ultimate habit tracker in mind, is that it allows you to get meaningful insights into your data. The more entries you log, the more powerful the insights. Wondering how your journey of quitting smoking has affected your mood? Or perhaps you want to know how caffeine intake affects your sleep? Whatever you’re wondering about your behavior, Metriport has you covered. Get it on iOS or Android for free today!