Transcription
This is my monthly habit tracker and mood checker. Days of the month are down the side, habits I'm tracking across the top, and there's space to write daily how I'm feeling.
There are four other things I now do by simply using a pen that have stopped my infinite scrolling and also completely changed everything that I eat and drink. The first step towards conquering my mindless doom scrolling addiction was to pay attention to the cues. So whenever I was at my desk, I would sit with a pen by my side. Whenever I got the urge to check my phone or the internet, I'd write down the time and what triggered this feeling. I really had to persevere with this and do it over a period of time, but eventually, I noticed a pattern in my behavior. Getting into the habit of reaching for a pen instead of my phone was fundamental.
For many years, I was simply using a folder like this and a pen and paper, but I did find that over time this diary became a bit of a mess as I wrote down different ideas for work or took notes from a phone call. I've since upgraded to the Remarkable Paper Pro, and I really swear by this device, but everything that I'm going to show you can be done just as easily using a folder like this and a pen. What gets measured gets managed.
Once I got into the habit of reaching for a pen instead of my phone, I started tracking my other habits using a simple card like this. The reason being that the simple act of measuring my habits increased my motivation to actually do them. This is how my habit tracking has evolved, and I quite like the visual layout of how my habits track. Going back over the past few months, I'll show you how I set this up. Down the left-hand side, I write the days of the month, and along the top here, I will write down the habits that I want to track this month. These habits can be anything at all that you want to track. The idea simply is that every day that you do this habit, you put a cross in the box. So if I show you my habit tracking for January here, you can see I've actually color-coded the different habits I want to track. In green, I have my exercise habits that I'm tracking. The reason why I'm tracking so many particular exercises is that I'm trying to rehabilitate my knee so I can get running again. In blue here, I have coffee 12:00 p.m., which means I'm trying to stop drinking coffee before midday; water only. So aside from coffee, the only other drink that I want to have is water; no added sugar 10 p.m. time. These habits speak for themselves, and book/audio book is me trying to educate myself every day by reading or listening to some non-fiction. Here in orange, we have AMWAP, story worthy, and three key tasks. These are my three journaling habits that I do every single day, and I will talk more about them later. And on the right-hand side, we have the highlights column. This is simply a couple of words with the highlight for what happened that day. I've highlighted a few in yellow here, such as "slept a solid 8 hours." The reason why I've highlighted that is that, for me, that's quite unusual; I don't sleep particularly well. The highlights column can be used for anything you want; I just like to write down either the most memorable or the most interesting thing that happened that day as a kind of brief snapshot to remind me of what happened. And on this habit tracker, you can see that there are three columns here which each have red or purple lines all the way down them, and this is because I have successfully managed to do that habit every single day for a month. This idea comes from the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. When he was starting out as a comedian, he wrote a joke every single day to get into the habit of writing more jokes, and every time he successfully did this, he put a red cross into his diary. The idea is that you don't break the chain; you keep it going as long as you can. So anytime that I'm able to complete a habit for a whole month, I like to draw a purple line connecting all of the crosses. The quest for the purple line really does motivate me to do my habits, but there are some habits in my habit tracker which I'm not trying to do every single day, such as running, and you can see in January I've only been for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 runs. And I do find that having all of my habits laid out in this visual form, particularly now with this color-coded system as well, it's really, really useful. I find it really interesting just to go back in time to look at the months and see what habits I was tracking, see how that was going, and also just see what the highlights were from each month.
I'm now going to show you how I completely overhauled my diet; changed what I ate without any friction whatsoever. So if I go back into my diary from a couple of years ago, there's one particular diary entry that I'm going to read to you, which is on the 12th of April 2023: "Woke up and looked at my phone; ran a 5K run on consecutive days; squandered any benefits by eating too much junk food: chocolate, crisps, salted nuts; finished boys' ice cream at the Italian restaurant; another poor day diet-wise." Here's the bit which is interesting: "Came up with the idea to track all of my food." So I was obviously feeling very frustrated this day because I'd done the healthy bit; I'd gone for a run, but then I completely undid all this good work by eating a whole lot of rubbish. So shortly after this, I simply started writing down everything that I was eating. So here you can see my food diary for the 13th of April 2023, which is the day afterwards. What I was very careful to do here during this period, when I was obviously just prone to eating a lot of rubbish—I think it was the Easter holidays and being given loads of Easter eggs—I wasn't restricting myself with anything that I ate; all I was doing was writing down and tracking everything that I ate. Over time, this slowly evolved to the point where I decided to allow myself to eat and drink anything that I wanted, but the caveat was if I wanted to have something, I had to write it down in my food diary before I ate it. And the process of forcing myself to write down everything that I ate before I ate it completely changed how I ate. It's all about becoming far more mindful and conscious of the things that we're eating. When you have your food diary starkly laid out in front of you with a list of everything that you're eating in one day, it has this very strange effect where it compels you to change your diet.
Story worthy: One of the most interesting books that I read last year was *Storyworthy* by Matthew Dicks. The key thing that I took away from this book and which I've now implemented into my own life is what he calls "homework for life." The idea behind this is that you find the most storyworthy moment from your day and you write it down. So here you can see January 2025: the 3rd of January, I spent half an hour searching for my car key; it was trapped down my trouser leg—don't ask. And on the 21st of January: Tom's favorite thing to do when he gets home from school is to sit on the toilet in my office and read *Empire* magazine; it's my favorite thing to do too. So the idea is that you just find the little moments, or the little either humorous moments or most storyworthy moments that happen to you each day, and you write it down. This is really one of the best ways to document your own life because it only takes a couple of minutes, and I think, particularly as somebody who makes videos as well, writing down these tiny little moments which happen every day just spark so many great ideas. And I've had ideas for YouTube videos that come off the back of just doing this exercise. I thoroughly recommend it.
In my habit tracker that I use every month, one of the journaling exercises that I try and do every single day is AMWAP. AMWAP stands for "as many wins as possible." The idea behind this is quite simple: at the end of each day, you simply write down as many wins as possible that have happened to you. So here you can see that I'm trying to use my AMWAP journal to emphasize the positive things which I'm tracking through my habit tracker. So: 5K run down in Chury; 16,000 steps; feeling positive and inspired about the year ahead. So I'm not only tracking the things which I've done that day, but I'm also tracking my mood with this as well. And I think for somebody who's an overthinker, which is me, using this journaling exercise has really helped kind of clarify my thoughts, and it just reminds you that if you do this every single day, the world is a good place; it's a good place to be. The best time of day to do this journaling exercise is last thing at night; in fact, it's the very last thing I do before I do my final journaling exercise, which is three key tasks. Three key tasks is a very simple thing to do, and the idea is that you simply write down the three most important tasks that you want to achieve tomorrow. The most important task is the first thing that you put on your list, and that's the first task that you'll tackle the very next day. I don't necessarily plan out my working day in great detail, but by making my three key task list basically, I'm ensuring that if nothing else gets done that day, as long as I do those three key tasks, I kind of feel like I'm on track. And you might find it really useful to just score out your three key tasks once you completed them each day. Having that as a visual reference for how you're progressing and plowing through your to-do list can be very motivating.
These five writing exercises are things that I try and do every day. I think when these exercises are done consistently on a daily basis, they can have a huge transformative effect, and it all stems from the idea that instead of reaching for your phone or going online, you nurture the habit of grabbing a pen instead. It's the only thing that has stopped me from infinite scrolling. So a lot of the ideas that I'm talking about in this video have been given to me through books that I read by people like BJ Fogg, James Clear, Nir Eyal, Matthew Dicks, and videos that I've seen online by people like Ru. Thank you all for the inspiration. [Music]