Reflective Habits: How do you go beyond habit tracking?
Frameworks to help you track your new creator habits at different stages of your practice.
Last week I talked about how important deliberate practice is when trying to start a new creator habit. One of the key features of deliberate practice is having a system for feedback that helps you continuously improve. So this week, I'm covering feedback and habit-tracking frameworks that help deliberately practice a new creator habit.
Why Habit Track As A Creator?
Habit tracking is one among many strategies for creators to stay consistent in their content production. By looking at progress on a daily basis, tracking reminds us that change doesn’t happen overnight, that success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out, and that if we make the effort, we will get better. If we don’t, we won’t.1
That said, the reason I’m covering more than one form of habit tracking is because I believe that no system is ever one-size fits all, and that the more strategies you have in your toolkit, the easier it is to find and shape a solution that’s uniquely yours.
Framework 1: (Binary) Habit Tracking
What is it: A (binary) habit tracker is simply a way to measure whether you did a habit. In its most basic form, it's a calendar that you cross off each day you stick with your habit routine. Multiple days with crosses become your habit streak.
What it's good for: Great for starting or rebooting a new habit.
This is the habit tracking framework that James Clear popularized2. And I find it pretty helpful, especially when you're starting out. Starting a new practice is hard. Usually, doing so successfully involves breaking the habit into small steps. Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit,3 has a great story about leaving her apartment every morning at 5am and hailing a taxi to the gym. While her habit/ goal may ultimately be exercising every morning, the small step she measures is whether she went downstairs to hail the taxi.
Tracking Small Steps As A Creator
For a creator looking to start a new habit (like, say, a newsletter writing practice), the first step might just be writing one sentence. Every day. And perhaps that's all that's tracked for the first week. Cross out the day when you wrote a sentence. Leave a blank on the day that you didn’t. The next week you might track writing a paragraph or writing for 5 minutes, and so forth, as you build up the habit and gain confidence in your ability to show up. This framework (when paired with small steps) is especially good at effectively starting a habit or reengaging a habit if you fell off the bandwagon (like I recently did with posting on Twitter).
When You Hit A Wall With Tracking
Sometimes, however, you find that you fail to do a habit for many days in a row until you’re totally discouraged with yourself. There are multiple reasons you might fall off. For example, the step you’re tracking might be too big, or it might not be important enough for you (aka it’s not something you actually care about, just something you think you should do). I’ll talk more about the goals and steps and identifying what’s important next week.
Other times you might get discouraged because you aren't really improving or are actively bored. Maybe there’s a habit you’ve shown up for very consistently and you ask yourself…what now? This happened to me with meditation, to be honest. And I realized, while I was happy to see a “habit streak,” every week, I wasn’t really learning or better understanding what I was doing outside of sitting & trying to pay attention to my breath. In this case, it’s important to start considering how to go beyond showing up and into improving. For this reason, I find the next framework really helpful.
Framework 2: Active Questioning
What it is: A tracking system that helps you track effort, progress and take responsibility over outcomes relative to overall goals.
What it's for: Great for going beyond showing up and into actively improving
This is a framework popularized by Marshall Goldsmith who noticed that asking questions that were active (aka Did I do my best to...) helped inspire personal responsibility for your habits and foster a mindset of improvement. For example, you could blame not writing one day on the fact that you had an unexpected work meeting come up. But if you asked yourself “did I do my best to write today?,” you might come to the conclusion that there were other opportunities to fit writing into your day, even if your day hadn’t gone as planned. Your score would remind you that you didn’t do everything you could have done to do your best. And at this point, you might actively consider what you could do differently tomorrow to avoid a similar fate.
Pushing Yourself With Active Questions
While you might start using this framework with small steps like “Did I do my best to sit down and write for 15 minutes,” once you’re scoring consistently, this framework could help you reframe questions in terms of qualitative goals like: “Did I do my best to write quality content?” or ”Did I do my best to write concise content” etc.
I like this framework because it consistently pushes me to consider what I could be doing differently and better, which in many ways is the foundation of deliberate practice. That said, it’s just as interesting to recognize the things that you consistently struggle with and let yourself ask why. As Goldsmith describes it, seeing where you fall short in your efforts can be pretty emotional:
That’s the secret power of daily self-questioning. If we fall short on our goals eventually we either abandon the questions or push ourselves into action. We feel ashamed or embarrassed because we wrote the questions, knew the answers, and still failed the test. When the questions begin with “Did I do my best to…” the feeling is even worse. We have to admit that we didn’t even try to do what we know we should have done.
Goldsmith, Marshall; Reiter, Mark. Triggers (p. 123).
Which brings me to my final framework, the qualitative one. Sometimes it helps to understand what’s really coming up for you when you’re struggling to stay consistent or hit publish or the myriad of other challenges that arise when creating content.
Framework 3: Qualitative Reflection
What it is: A qualitative feedback system that helps you celebrate yourself, identify what’s holding you back, and practice active learning.
What it's for: Great for gaining better self-knowledge and understanding what’s driving both your successes and challenges with your habits.
Doing quick qualitative journaling as a form of tracking is incredibly effective at understanding yourself more broadly, and understanding what’s motivating both your achievement and struggles with creator habits. Sometimes it reveals that the thing you are trying to do is deeply energy draining to you and perhaps not the goal you want to pursue at all.
Other times, you may be predisposed (as I am), not to notice anything positive, in which case, writing about what went well can be deeply motivating and help you stay engaged with the sometimes challenging process.
Outside of reflecting more deeply on your actions, qualitative tracking could also be tactical. For example, on this newsletter front, I am working on becoming a more engaging writer, and the next thing I specifically want to learn about is crafting effective headlines.
The qualitative questions you ask yourself aren’t limited to the ones I’ve listed (these are just a few I tend to ask myself), and you don’t have to write just one sentence (as I happen to).
Though it’s hard to spot trends in qualitative feedback over time (I should know, I used to do UX research as part of my job), these entries are really goldmines. It’s worth it to schedule weekly or biweekly moments to read over these insights and pull out patterns!
It Doesn’t Have To Take Long…
Okay, I’ll just leave with one last thought, which is: this doesn’t have to take forever. To be honest, I use all three of these frameworks on a daily basis. At the bottom of each weekly habit tracker I have a row that says “Tracking & Learnings” to remind myself to track and journal. The whole process takes me about 10 minutes or less every night, but I try never to miss it, because it’s at the heart of getting better, seeing progress, and reminding myself that there are things to celebrate!
Thoughts? Feedback?
Phew, I know this was a long one! Your feedback (a simple email, heart, comment, anything) would do! The biggest complement/ endorsement, of course, would be a share, since I am just starting out :)
Do you actively track your habits? I’d love to hear what you find most helpful. If you haven’t tried any tracking or reflective habits, take a stab at it and send a picture! I’d love to share our collective approaches!
James Clear. Atomic Habits
Twyla Tharp. The Creative Habit