Why I Hate Habit Trackers

and what I use instead

The Problem with Habits

The problem with habits is that they take time to develop, even when you use tricks to stack them. (See James Clear's Atomic Habits, which I highly recommend.) So, although I'm all in favor of leveraging habits as much as possible, you have to pick your battles.

I live in a nest of clutter, courtesy of post-divorce despondency and a tendency to live mostly in my head. (By the time I woke up enough to notice and care, the situation was overwhelming.) How I'm trying to get out from under all that is a worthy discussion in itself, but for now I just want to acknowledge that habits help. To a degree.

I can't just tell myself that I want to develop the habit of living in a clean and organized house. That "habit" would actually be comprised of a host of small complementary habits which need to be cultivated incrementally.

Where Habits Fit

When tackling a long-standing problem which developed out of bad habits, the first thing you want to do is try to stop making it worse while you're trying to make it better. Draw the line, maintain the line, then move the line.

Habits are great for maintenance.

For me, dirty dishes are a problem both frequent enough and significant enough that I prioritized dealing with them. My nest of clutter almost always includes glasses and dishes sitting next to my living room sofa, or on the dining room table. When I walk through these rooms, I will grab what I can and take it to the kitchen. I used to turn a blind eye to all the clutter (lest I be overwhelmed), but I have trained myself to see just the dishes in this scenario. It has become a habit.

Why Use a Habit Tracker?

How would I use a habit tracker for tracking that habit of gathering dirty dishes? I certainly wouldn't want to have to pull out a notebook or bring up a phone app every time I get up to go to the bathroom and happen to pick up a mug on the way. The point of this particular habit is to promote efficiency. Tracking it would have an opposing effect.

I could take some time in the evening to go through a list of habits I am working on, noting whether I've gathered any dirty dishes during the day. I'm not confident I would remember; but even if I did, what is the purpose of tracking it? Every time I fill the dishwasher, if I need to go make a few trips to other rooms I will be reminded that I haven't kept up with that habit. And if I realize that I've missed a day, what am I supposed to do with that information?

But of course there are other kinds of habits I may want to develop where tracking might make sense. Suppose, for example, that I want to improve my guitar skills, and I set a minimum goal of practicing for at least 15 minutes every day. Maybe I would find it motivational to see how long I can keep a streak going.

Should I use an app for that?

I've seen and applied the advice to leave a guitar out somewhere convenient, so that when I walk past it I am more likely to pick it up and maybe run through a song, or perhaps even put in 15 minutes of practice. The "activation energy" required to engage in this little "break" activity is appreciably lower than if I have to get the guitar out of its case and put it back afterwards. That’s inconvenient. It is also an off-putting inconvenience to navigate to the right place in the right app in order to mark whether I've done something.

For me at least, keeping a paper and pencil near the guitar so I can track what I've done is a little less inconvenient. I've done that, but I still tend not to use this method. I don't really care enough how many times I've played a song. (I only care how well I can play it.) And since I didn't look at the clock when I picked up the guitar, I don't know how long I've practiced.

But the inconvenience is not the worst problem with habit trackers, as far as I'm concerned.

Habit Trackers Are...Stressful!

If you're the kind of person who gets joy out of metrics, then great! Use a habit tracker! But I've tried Duolingo, and when I realized after two years that I wasn't really learning French, I had to take a good hard look at how the gamification was making me feel.

Missing a day doesn't feel good, even with something like Duolingo's "streak freeze" to mitigate the "damage.” Of course, that's partly where the motivational aspect comes from—you want to avoid feeling bad!—but inevitably something will happen to cause you to skip. It might be an emergency, or a higher-priority obligation, or even just a change in routine which leads to inadvertently forgetting. Regardless of the reason, it's a setback which leaves you feeling like you're starting over.

I prefer a different approach entirely.

All I Want Is a Reminder

I want to confront myself every day with the conscious decision of whether or not I am going to do a particular activity. If I decide I have a good reason to skip, then I can just let it go, knowing that I can choose again the next day. If I find myself skipping more often than not, then I'll have learned that this particular activity isn't really all that important to me right now, and this will cause me to reconsider my priorities.

I don't need any notebook or tracking app to remind me whether or not I did it the day before. In most cases I’ve found that I remember. (If it's become such an automatic habit that I don't remember, then I don't need to be tracking it anyway.) What I do often need is a reminder to do it until it becomes a habit. That reminder doesn't have to be anything sophisticated.

I use a 3x5 card.