Habit Tracker

What is a Habit Tracker?

A is a type of tool designed to help its user keep track of their daily habits. It’s a good tool to check if you can do certain things daily, weekly, or monthly.

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It can appear in different forms. It can even be an app on your smartphone, but the most common form it takes is a chart or table that has all months and dates of a year and a section where you can list down all of your habits, which may include jogging outside the house, reading one chapter of a book daily, meditating, walking your pet, etc.

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For every habit you complete, you can mark it off the chart, and then you can tally it at the other end of the sheet to know how many times you did that good habit in a month. By marking your good habits off a chart, you can see a visual representation of how many habits you’ve consistently done. This may instill an awareness of your good and healthy habits and give you the motivation and inspiration to establish a routine you can follow. Become inspired with our good habit chart PDF, which is free to download.

How does a Habit Tracker work?

For this guide, we will go with the most common type of habit tracker, which we discussed a little earlier. We actually created a printable template for this good habit tracker that you will see later on, so let’s discuss how this particular one works.

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One of the first things you’ll see when you look at our template is the months of the year, arranged in sequence from left to right. Below this arrangement is the maximum number of days a month can have, which is thirty-one. These are also arranged in sequence from left to right, though, unlike the months, you don’t have to select anything. Below these numbers are rows of checkboxes.

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On the left side are blank fields divided into multiple rows that go to the bottom of the page. These rows will be used to list down your habits! You can indicate if these habits are supposed to be done daily, a certain number of days a week, or specific days of the week. They should look something like this:

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• Night jogging (M-W-F)
• Read a chapter of a book (Sun)
• Prepare breakfast (Daily)
• Prepare dinner (Daily)
• Do the laundry (Sat)
• Pay bills (every 15th)
• Water the plants (Tue)
• Clean the bathroom (Thu)

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Once you’ve listed all your habits, all you need to do is tick off the boxes for each day that you do them!

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On the right side of the page, there is a Total section. This is where you will tally how many times you did a habit for the whole month.

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On the second page, you have an entire section for free-form writing. You can discuss your goals for the month, what your plans are, etc.

When is it best to use this Habit Tracker template?

If you’re wondering when you’re supposed to use a habit tracker, that’s entirely up to you!

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Let’s say you are a member of The Workforce, and you’ve been quite busy with your workdays to the point that you are starting to believe that you no longer have time for yourself, so it’s all just work, go home, sleep five or six days a week. If that is your life, perhaps you might want to try to use this! Using this might give you a slap in the face, reminding you to give your personal life as much attention as you give your work life. Who knows? This might just be the thing you need to create a sense of structure that includes your personal life, and it might even give you a sense of control, too.

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Now, if you are a mental healthcare professional (which is likely, because you are reading this on Carepatron), this might be something that you’d like to issue to one of your patients or clients. If part of your mental health practice is wellness, then you might want to issue this as a type of worksheet to them to help promote wellness and instill a sense of motivation to achieve what they want.

What are the benefits of using this printable Habit Tracker?

Help people break free from monotonous routines.

As we mentioned earlier, if your life is all work and no play, then actively using a habit tracker might help you shake things up to bring a little more color to your boring life. It makes you aware of your current routine and can help you reconfigure that routine to include things that actually make you happy.

Motivate self-improvement.

Once you’ve started using a habit tracker and have been following it for a bit, you might notice that you’re starting to follow a new rhythm, and it’s a rhythm so good, you don’t want to go back to simply waking up to go to work and coming home to sleep. The more you can follow your routine, the more evident the change in your moods will be. The more you feel good, the more you’ll want to be able to maintain your newfound routine.

Encourage goal setting and instill a sense of accomplishment.

We included a free-form section in our template for you to write your goals. If you’ve managed to follow a routine revolving around your habits, then you can definitely add some goals into the mix and work your way to achieve them by giving the same attention you’ve been giving to your habits through this tracker.

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It’s also likely that you’re more confident in following what you want and being consistent with doing your habits on a routine basis by the time you start adding specific goals, so you’re likely to be more confident to be able to achieve them.