Introduction
We all have been through trying to track our habits, like writing on paper or on your calendar what you should do, or using a specific app about it.
My experiences
In my experiences, I could never pass a couple weeks recording them, but there is one specific mistake (among others) that I always ended up doing which was do it for the numbers.
I believe this habit of caring to much about the outcome, the results and the numbers is something about the system I’m inserted to, in which it does not matter what you do, what matters is what you’ve done and how it can be profitable.
In this article I don’t cover why that happens (even though I do care about explaining it), but what’s wrong with it and what we should do instead.
First of all, I’d like to quote the economist Charles Goodhart:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
And that is precisely what we do when we care about the numbers, they should NOT be our focus.
What we SHOULD be doing instead is to affirm what we want our habits to be. For example, if you want to wake up at 5AM every day, you should not be focusing on keeping track of how many days you wake up at 5, but you should be understanding why should you do it, and that it is a part of your daily habits, so when it comes a day where you can’t wake up at 5, your excuse will be that this is an exception of your rule and NOT the opposite.
Conclusion
You should be focused on reaffirming your identity you want to become, like anything else in this world, your habits are going to have exceptions, and that is precisely what they should be: exceptions.
Your daily habits are your rules, the only thing that matters is consistency, since discipline might help you one time or another, but won’t be present in a daily basis.
Reference
- Cover image from Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash
If you have any doubts or advice, feel free to leave a comment or ping me on Twitter
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