Last month I decided to track how consistent I was with my daily habits. The idea wasn’t to be perfect, but to bring better self awareness of how I was doing.
Here’s how I did in February:
It worked exactly as I wanted. It gave me more self awareness from both a micro and macro perspective.
From a micro perspective, I would sometimes realise I was at risk of not doing something as the day went on. For example, it might be mid afternoon before I realised that I hadn’t drank any water yet. If I left it for a few more hours, I would be into the evening and there was a good chance I wouldn’t get my two litres in. That would force me to course correct and drink a litre immediately to put me back on track. I can guarantee the big picture would look worse had I not had this daily dose of self awareness.
From a macro perspective, it’s super useful to look at a picture of a month like this. I can see what habits are almost effortless and which ones need a bit more focus. It’s also obvious where I have some harder thinking to do if I want to improve my consistency.
Here is what I noticed:
- No alcohol is a given. I’m 231 days sober. It’s a default habit and there’s no risk of having a drink.
- Being active 4-5 times a week and intermittent fasting is easy. An almost perfect record.
- Drinking 2 litres of water, 3 cups of caffeine (before Midday) and taking my supplements is fairly easy. A few slip ups here or there, but comfortably in the 80/20 zone.
- Eating paleo (ish), sleeping 6.5 hours, meditating for 60 mins and networking with two people a day need a lot of work. My record is anything from terrible to patchy at best.
- Weekends are trickier for me. It’s super easy to get off track with even habits that are fairly easy to keep up in the week. That’s something to think about.
I should add that mediating for 60 mins and networking with two people per day are new habits I’m trying to establish. I’m still in the early stages of figuring out the best way to get these habits to stick. But, paleo (ish) and sleeping 6.5 hours are things that have been on my radar for a long time, and as you can see I’m struggling with them.
As I head into March, it would be super easy (and predictable) to set out to try and improve everything that needs work. But, I know that will quickly become overwhelming and lead to failure. Instead, I need to pick one thing to focus on.
That’s sleep. It’s the easiest one to improve (I have a good sense of what to change) and will make the biggest impact. If I’m sitting here at the end of March looking at the same type of picture, but with improved sleep – that’ll be a hell of a win.
If you want to improve your habits, I’d highly recommend tracking them like this. Having something in front of you that’s visual, gives you a healthy dose of self awareness many times a day. And being able to look at the bigger picture helps give you a sense of where to focus your efforts for improvement.
See you at the beginning of April 😊
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