How to use habit tracking to stop bad habits

Track a habit or its inverse?

So if you want to track if you are “staying up late” then should you track that and mark “stayed up late” as a habit?

With a “streak of shame” approach you track your actual bad habit. Completing the habit for multiple days in a row would be bad, so checking off the habit would be shameful - hence the name “streak of shame”.

It's fine to track it this way, but because we usually associate streaks with good habits, this could be confusing. You would like to break the bad streak, not maintain it!

So you can flip your habit and say: “Avoided staying up late” or “went to bed early” and track that. Then marking it as complete would have the same mechanics as positive habits you want to develop or keep up.

Another advantage of tracking the avoidance of the bad habit is that by default the habit is “unchecked” which is equivalent to giving in to the bad habit. Sadly, this is often closer to reality than the other way around. It also doesn't leave you with an illusion that you are doing great if you simply just forget to track your habit.

When to tick off the avoidance of habit

When you track a positive habit, you can just check it off as you finish doing it, similarly to an item on a to-do list.

But what about an avoidance habit? Technically, if you track avoiding a bad habit for a given day, you shouldn't mark it as complete before the day is over. Imagine that you mark “going to bed early” as done at 10 pm and then get distracted for a couple of hours with the latest series and then stay up late… That wouldn't be ideal!

If you want to be 100% correct, you can mark the habit as complete or not complete for a given day on the following day. In some tools, it's a bit awkward or there is no option to do that for days in the past so the alternative approach is to just offset your habit by 1 day in a way you interpret it, not in a way when you set it. So marking “went to bed early” on Sunday would actually mean that you went to bed early on Saturday.

Final thoughts

I hope this article will help you with stopping your bad habits. It might not be enough for some harder-to-break habits but combined with other techniques it should dramatically increase your probability of success.

Bonus Tip

You can also install tools that measure the behavior you want to limit directly. One example of such a tool would be WatchLimits which helps you monitor your watching time and set limits. For example, if your problem is binging on Netflix causes you to “go to bed late” (the bad habit), WatchLimits you would record your watching stats and even prevent you from watching too much (if you set limits for yourself!).

Having an additional tool that tracks your behavior is also helpful in case you forget to update the habit tracker for a couple of days. You will then be able to reliably fill it in for missed days without second guessing and maintain accurate records of your habits in one place!