Following on from Wednesday’s post about the Everyday Systems site, I wanted to mention the fantastic habit tracking system Reinhard’s developed: HabitCal.

It doesn’t matter what new behaviour you’re trying to introduce into your life (cutting out smoking, change of diet, reducing computer time), the simplest way of tracking how you are doing is to ask yourself each day: did I succeed, fail or was today exempt for some reason?

HabitCal tracks each of these states using the colour code of green for success, red for failure and yellow for exempt days. It’s easy to set up and you can update in seconds.

I’m finding its simplicity so useful. While I still feel I need to track something (it’s like being three years old and earning stickers all over again – there’s an incredible psychological urge not to slip up just so you don’t have to mark the entire day as a FAILURE), I’m also not over-tracking and ending up with a pile of irrelevant data.

For example, a list of the exact number of calories I ate every day for a month isn’t actually that useful if I end up not losing lost as much as I hoped. With HabitCal, though, I’m getting an immediate visual picture where I can see that Friday is a real problem day, or that there’s a huge bunch of reds the week I had a friend to stay.

You can use HabitCal to track anything you like, not just the systems outlined at Everyday Systems. One thing you do have to be aware of, though, is that your data is completely public. So don’t put anything on it that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know!

You can see my HabitCal tracker here. I’m currently tracking the No S Diet, Weekend Luddite, Glass Ceiling and Exercise (this last row is deliberately blank as it’s an established habit of mine so I’m only tracking failures). It’s currently a pleasant display of greens and yellows, but feel free to hassle me if any reds start appearing!