“Wow… I should do this every day!”

It is a syndrome many people experience. They start going for a walk and realise that they suddenly think a lot more clearly about things. They drink those 5-6 glasses of water during the day, really cleanses the system and realise they feel a lot more better. They actually go for a run or workout and start feeling much better. They wake up instead of hit snooze and feel they get a lot more done during the day. They take a moment to really look their significant other in the eyes realising the love they really feel about him/her. And then they say to themselves “Wow… I should do this every day!”

Then why don’t we?

It is really small things that make us feel better on a daily basis, but for some reason we still avoid doing them. Is it because we are lazy? Just procrastinating? or how?

I personally believe it is a matter of it not being a habit. And there are so many ways to start helping yourself making things a habit, but there is always something the comes between. So I would recommend making yourself a Habit Tracker.

Open up a spreadsheet in Excel og Google Docs, and fill out the things you would like to do every single day in the outermost left column. One row for each item you wish to do. This could be “Get up at 6 a.m.”, “Drink 6 glasses of water”, “Send at least one smile to a colleague” or “Compliment my kids or spouse on something they did” etc.

Then reduce the width of the following 31 columns so that each cell is a little square. Make sure to leave a few rows blank the bottom of your list, so that you always can write new things on it. Print it out and keep it on your person every day.

Every time you have accomplished one of the habit goals during a day, make sure to fill out the square to give yourself a great overview of how well you are doing, and do your best to mark of all of them. Be sure to also allow yourself to leave blank squares at times. It is okay to skip gym one day, or sleep out a headache or hangover. And don’t square them off if you actually didn’t do it. Be disciplinary.

Give yourself a month with this sheet, and I promise you - it will become so much natural to you and at the end turn into habits.