- This video is sponsored by Skillshare, where I just launched a brand new course on how to build strong habits, and you can take it for free by using the link below to start a two month free trial. Everyone who starts a new habit dreams of sticking to it successfully over the long term. When you lace up your running shoes and you step out the door on day one of your new running habit, your mind is already jumping forward in time, anticipating a successful day 100, but of course sticking to a new habit is hard.
Some days you're just not feeling it, or some days it's raining outside, or your cat steals your running shoes. As a result, many people fail long before they ever reach that vaunted day 100. Now one way you could make yourself more likely to succeed is by tracking your habit building progress.
As Peter Drcker once said, "What gets measured gets managed," and by keeping a record of your progress, you could really motivate yourself to keep pushing forward, but for a lot of people, classic habit tracking methods do have their problems. For one, the entire point of most habit tracking methods is to track a habit indefinitely and have this ever increasing streak, but for many people this can be intimidating. The pressure to infinitely track a habit can lead to them just never starting in the first place because they don't know how long they want to go for.
Secondly, and kind of on the same coin, one failure breaks the streak. Now this is supposed to be motivating and for many people it is, but for a lot of people, once they break that streak, they feel like they've wasted a bunch of time and they never start tracking again. So, today I want to share with you a bit of a different habit tracking system.
One that lets you start small, easily note the causes for any failures, and intelligently evaluate how you're doing every couple of weeks, and before you ask, there is not an app for this because it's actually done on a paper notebook. That's right, we are building an analog system here, and by we I actually mean my friend, Martin, who came up with this system and who has been using it for about a year at this point, so I'm just going to call it the Martin System. Now, unlike most habit tracking systems, the Martin System works in roughly two week cycles.
The first half of the month is tracked, which is actually 15 days, yes I know, and then the last half of the month is tracked, and each time you sit down to plan out your habits for a cycle, you know that you're only tracking those habits for two weeks. So the big benefit here is that you're not going to overwhelm yourself. You know that once a cycle is over, you get to redefine what you're going to be doing.
So the habits you really care about, you can stick to them. The ones you didn't care about, you can ditch them. Now your habits are tracked with three different types of markers.
Success, failure, and a neutral marker that allows you to mark failures that were really beyond your control. Perhaps more importantly, there is a dedicated section for making notes about why failures happened, and under that there is a cycle review section where you can make any notes about lessons you learned, or about anything you'd like to change once this cycle is done. So here is a quick tutorial about how to set this system up and use it for yourself.
First, list the days of the cycle across the top of the page. Either one though 15 or 16 through the end of the month. Then, list out the habits you want to track beneath those numbers, leaving some space beneath each one, and for each habit that you wanna track, you're gonna want a general category for that habit, a specific listing of what you're going to do during this cycle, and the days during which you're going to do it.
So you could put "D" to mark a daily habit, you could add "M" through "F" for weekday habits, you could add Monday, Wednesday, Friday, really whatever it is that you want, and that's another part of this system that I really like. It's really really flexible. So my current cycle might say exercise, where I'll have climbing, lifting, or 15 minutes of cardio, and I have 15 minutes there because I wanna give myself a minimum number of minutes that I'm going to do cardio, and if I go beyond that, that's totally cool, but I wanna have like a minimum to shoot for.
Music goals, so 15 minutes of finger picking on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and some scale and chord practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A sleep goal because I wanna be in bed by 10:30 on the weeknights and let's be honest, I'm not that good at doing that without a habit tracking system, and finally a reading goal, and here is where I wanna note that you can use this system to track your progress on output based goals as well as input based goals, and it's actually a great system for breaking down longer term goals that you have and figuring out a daily habit that's gonna allow you to make consistent progress toward it. So for example, say that you want to finish reading a book within a two week cycle, well if you break that book down into chapters, or if you divide the number of pages by the number of days that you're going to read in your cycle, you can easily create a habit that allows you to do that.
Finally, on the left page, create those two sections. Failure notes and cycle review, then each day track your habits. On successful days put down a "+", if you fail out of laziness put a "-", and if something prevents you from doing the habit, but it wasn't a pure laziness failure, then you can mark it with a circle to denote that it was something completely out of your control, but in either case, put the date on which you failed over in the failure notes section and give a little of a description about why you failed.
This is gonna let you go back and review later to make intelligent decisions so that you don't fail in the same way in the future. If running for an hour a day was too much, maybe go down to 15 minutes a day, and again allow yourself to overshoot if you want. Finally, when the cycle ends, write down anything that you learned or any tweaks that you wanna make in that cycle review section.
Then, when you sit down and plan your next cycle, you can make intelligent tweaks based on what you've learned from the previous cycle and also any shifts in your priorities, or in the amount of free time that you have. Now the habits that you're tracking here should be derived from your long term goals, and if you wanna learn how to effectively determine both what those long term goals should be and how to break them down into well defined habits, then you might wanna go take my new class on Skillshare. This class is all about building strong habits and routines, and it takes you through the entire process of defining your goals, turning them into habits, and then learning how to combine your own self-discipline with a power of external systems to stick to those habits.
So if you wanna be more productive this year, I think you'll really get a lot out of this course, and you can take it for free by using the link below to sign up for a free two month trial on Skillshare, which will also give you access to my other course all about building a productivity system, plus thousands of other courses in their library covering graphic design, music production, video editing, photography, and more, and after that trial, Skillshare is less than 10 bucks a month, which basically makes it like a Netflix subscription except for it's a heck of a lot more useful to your future and your career prospects. Once again you can use that link in the description down below to get a free two month trial, which will let you take my new class for free and also support this channel. Thanks so much for watching.
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