How I Went From Skipping Habits To Consistent Green Streaks

Consistently > constantly

Look at the image above with my current habit streaks in January and February 2024.

Now compare that to my habit streaks in the same period — but one year ago in 2023 (image below).

2024 looks much better than 2023, green streaks-wise.

How come? Let’s take a look.

How I set up the Habit Tracker, at first

• I placed habits in the order I intended to do them.
• The green dashed and dotted lines in the image above mark the end of one part of the day, or one batch of habits. Take January 2023. In a perfect world, everything including and up to ‘walk 10K’ is done in the morning. Fruit, meditation, and dance are for the afternoons or early evening, leaving the language learning for the evening.
• I put every habit on its own line. This gave me a lot of individual tasks to tick off each day.

2023

In January and February 2023, I tracked 12 habits using the Free Habit Tracking Template in Google Sheets.

It’s not like each habit only took a minute.

• Yoga/stretching takes 10–15 minutes
• Pushups take around 3–5 minutes
• Prehab and The Core Play routines take up to 30 minutes
• For ‘fysio’ or physical therapy exercises, I need 25–30 minutes
• Leg exercises take around 20 minutes
• Walking 10K steps? Another 75 minutes
• Meditation? Add on 20 minutes
• Dance class? 2 hours per dance class, including changing clothes, commuting there and back, and the class itself
• German and Mandarin studying: 30 minutes at 15 minutes per language.

When we add this up, we already have 333–345 minutes of habit-tracking activities, per day, not including breaks, and not including time lost due to context switching or breaks.

That’s more than 5.5 hours of my waking time.

If I’d religiously squeeze in all the morning habit stuff, I’d at minimum still need 195 minutes or 3.25 hours.

No wonder I wasn’t consistently ticking off *all* habits every day.

Around 1–1.5 hours after waking up, my brain is ready to start working. I get restless if I don’t. And if I follow the entire morning habit curriculum, I’ll be tired, and have lunch before I even get to work.

Tweaking the tracker every month

I wasn’t consistent with my green streaks in January 2023.

I didn’t want to fail myself two months in a row, so I tweaked the spreadsheet, leading to finishing February 2023 on a greener streak.

For February 2023, I changed the order in which I wanted to do some habits to see if this

• Makes them easier to do
• Has any influence on the total number of green checkboxes
• And actually gets me closer to consistent green streaks.

2024

Nowadays, I’m ‘only’ tracking 8 habits.

I am cheating, though.

As you see in the image above, I placed a few habits together.

• Portuguese and Mandarin language studies (I like to do one after the other in one or adjacent sittings)
• Eat fruit and journal (I eat my breakfast while I journal)

From January to February, I also changed the order of a few habits.

I don’t like to immediately go for a walk outside post-wake-up but rather go outside as a ‘reward’ for doing my morning meditation, my language studying, eating fruit, and journaling.

Side note: I won’t rack up 5K steps in one go, but rather start the day by racking up at least 1–2K steps before noon. That makes it easier to reach the 5K goal later before the end of the day.

How I consistently get green streaks on my habit tracker

Let’s compare last year’s and this year’s streaks once more.

It looks 10x better.

More or less the same habits have lived on here for years. I’ve endlessly tweaked their order and experimented with omitting some or adding some more.

The approach I’m taking now seems to be working:

• I can’t learn any language at the end of the day. I won’t have brain to focus or retain much. So I’m doing it as one of the first tasks in the mornings.
• Walking 10K steps is a stretch. I reduced it to 8K. When that still turned out as too many months in a row, I reduced this number even further to 5K. This is my bare minimum and a number I can more easily hit.
• No more lofty video editing goals. I need it to feel easy. No “Thou Must Publish 1000 Videos Every Week.” Nah. Trimming a 2-second clip counts as working on the channel. So does reducing the volume of one clip.
• Exercise. Anything counts. I did one arm toning video of 7 minutes? Awesome, that’s exercise done for the day. I spent 5 minutes on the mat in the gym? That, too, counts.
• Read 1 page, not 1 chapter. With at LEAST one page every day, I’ll finish the book sooner than when I set the goal of reading one chapter a day — but never doing it. And once I start reading that one page, I often think, “Well, I’m here reading anyway, might as well continue.”

It took years to get here

I’ve been trying to establish healthy habits since 2018–2019 using the spreadsheet. (I tried a bunch of apps in the past, but none stuck, so I’m not mentioning them.)

I desperately wanted to be that superstar who brags online about their perfect streaks. I want to get my shit together and don’t think I’m there — yet.

One glance at last year’s 2023 spreadsheet and overwhelm punched me in the face. There was too much to tick off that took too much time.

Currently, I’m also not in a position to spend 3.25 hours on morning habits before even getting to any work. (With my current routine, I need around 1.5 hours, this is acceptable and doable.)

7 Things I did and kept in mind to get green streaks

1. Keep tweaking. If a certain order isn’t working, I’ll switch up the order of some habits and try again the next month.
2. Give it time. I remind myself that I’m not going to ditch all bad habits at once or establish 10 healthy habits in one go. Finding what works well for you takes time.
3. Less is more. Instead of half-arsing 20 habits in your perfect, imaginary world, maybe go for 5 core habits that’ll make the biggest positive impact in your life? For me, that’s the basics as simple as eating fruit, journaling, meditation, moving, and learning my languages.
4. One day at a time. I don’t shame myself if I don’t tick off as many habits as I wish. Whatever. I’ll try again tomorrow.
5. As a menstruating female, I’m ditching the circadian rhythm (24-hour clock) that men, kids, and postmenopausal women live according to, and am reading up on how my hormones and ‘infradian rhythm’ (the monthly cycle) influence my mood and energy levels throughout 28 days. This’ll give me a larger playing field and more room to plan tasks in sync with my cycle and get MORE done with LESS effort in these 28 days, instead of squeezing everything into the same 24 hours, every day, regardless of my fluctuating energy levels. (Book references: Period Power by Maisie Hill, In The Flo by Alisa Vitti)
6. This is an ongoing journey. I’ve been habit-tracking since 2019. My current habits order seems to be working, for now. But once it stops being effective, I’m ready to purge it all and start from scratch.
7. Aim for the bare minimum. And build up your stamina slowly. Aim for reading 1 page, do 1 minute of exercise. Anything beyond that is nice to have.