Today I am making myself a new habit tracker
So much has gone completely off course in life, I am running behind with important tasks, admin, payments, self care and social commitments. When I speak to friends they mostly seem to have the same struggles as I do.
Enter: The Habit Tracker (or call it whatever you prefer)
In the past I drew my habit trackers by hand and I loved doing that. But it is time consuming each time and paper is much less forgiving of corections than digital is. My hand drawn trackers looks more organic and nice and worked great; except they didn’t work at all when I didn’t prepare them.
Months go by between spurts of focused energy. In these months I am like a ship that loses its course and drifts in the occean and that’s honestly not helpful in getting my shit together. That’s why I have decided to finally (3 years since starting habit trackers) accept making a digital habit tracker: In March I want to work on improving my habits again, catch up with all the loose ends of grown up life. And while I prefer having my habit tracker on paper I am going to test preparing my new tracker in Google Sheets. And I’ll share it with you.
literally hours later:
I didn’t expect it to take so long. It took about 90 minutes to make myself a basic habit tracker using Google Sheets but then I spent another 2 hours fine tuning it to make it more presentable for the public, and adding 4 additional variations, because my yellow colour scheme might not be everyone else’s cup of tea….
Here is the link to Etsy where you can find it for £4-£5 / $5-$6
(I was going to share it for free but the time it took… wow..)
Now I understand better why people pay money for digital products. Because (speaking to myself here:) “Yes, it’s true, you can make your own for free but it takes time and wouldn’t we rather read a book, go for a walk, snooze, sell something for 10x the value on eBay?”
Here is the link to this habit tracker, I slightly changed the design* of it to offer prefilled categories & blank ones, with & without background colour. It’s not the most beautiful thing in the universe but I really think it’s a good first start both for myself having made it AND having uploaded it to Etsy as well as maybe for you to test it. It’s nothing too precious, it’s just meant to be a tool to help myself get jump started at taking better care of myself and not get so lost in life’s distractions and tasks that I neglect my health and wellbeing.
In my past habit tracker I included a lot of the work that I need to get done, open projects, weekly non-negotiable targets, but in this habit tracker I focused mainly on the basics of self care, with some entries for life responsibilities.
Being self-employed is time consuming and working from home gives no separation between life and career. I think this comes at a detriment to both.
*design = I really am not sure that I should call this design. Design is a grand overstatement when you see my little habit tracker making effort. Maybe it would be better described as ‘the look of it’.
Who is this Habit Tracker for?
This is for you fellow nerds like myself. Nerds who fall down work-and-distraction-rabbit-holes and forget to drink enough water, only realise that they didn’t go for a walk and take enough steps after the sun goes down, and could accidentally eat only bananas all day and forget to cook the green vegetables or to do the dishes.
I think this tracker would be ADHD friendly, if that is something you are thinking about.
You are probably seeing this because I sent you a link directly.
The original file was made in Google Sheets and unexpectedly took 3 hours to format and export multiple times until the bones of the tracker were right enough. (the initial one I made for just myself was done in much, much less time, but somehow making it public added 2+ hours.)
If you are like me then you might find my habit tracker useful.
I made this to help me keep track of basic self care and action steps to get my life back on track.
I use mine on ipad in Goodnotes. The files are formatted to A5 size and I have included 5 versions, the exact pre-filled categories one that I use (you can see it in the preview) as well blank for you to add your own categories and actions that you would like to accomplish regularly.
I would love it if you would buy this and test it for me, and please give me feedback privately when we next meet on Skype or Whatsapp or in person.
It would be great if you would get use out of this tracker, too.
You will need either:
- A stylus and a tablet with an app that lets you import a pdf file and write on it. (I use ipad, apple pencil and Goodnotes)
OR - A printer, to print out the A5 tracker, you might need to fold it to fit it into your current notebook.
This is a PDF file.
I airdrop it from my computer to my ipad and import it straight into Goodnotes.
You could also save your pdf as a jpg and use the tracker that way. I find that this negatively affects the clarity of the text. I prefer to use my tracker in PDF format imported to Goodnotes.
Speaking of better habits… The sun is inching very close to the horizon line. I really shoudl run outside and get my 3000 steps in. Unless I want to turn into a slug. And I have to say, I think slugs may have more muscle and energy than I ..
Let’s get this habit tracking journey started!
p.s. what do you think? Team habit tracking or just team daily list? (aren’t they the same?)
p.p.s. Blog content 100% written by me, Birgit (can’t you tell? as always messy and the opposite of brevity.. haha.) and summary written by my new co-editor called “All the Intelligent Thing” yes, AI (Künstliches Hirn im Netz) – because it’s almost like having a helpful friend or virtual assistant.
Links I shared in this blog entry (only one today):
- The habit tracker I made today and uploaded to my tiny Etsy shop
All the Links I shared in yesterday’s blog post in one list for easier reference:
- Birgit’s Storygraph Bookshelf & Reading List (free, Goodreads alternative)
- Dropbox (free and if you use my link to sign up and upload some files then you get extra free storage in addition to the basic free amount)
- ‘Because this is my first life’ (이번 생은 처음이라 ), romantic K-Drama, on Netflix
- Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee *
- The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert D. Kaplan *
- The Naked Tourist, by Lawrence Osborne *
4.5 hours
That’s the time it took to write this blog entry & create the habit tracker from scratch & reformat it multiple times & test it & upload it to Etsy and to finally press publish on today’s blog post.
(I share this to let you know that maybe youa ren’t slow, maybe it’s just that things take time.)
Birgit Over 7 Seas 