This is the final step in creating your morning routine.
You've defined your goal, got creative coming up with ideas, set specific objectives, thought about how to add new habits to existing ones, and added your morning routine to your calendar! Wow, that's a lot.
In this lesson, we will talk about keeping track. From my experience, I noticed that it's great to see my progress over time, so that I have a sense of what I achieved. And seeing progress also keeps me motivated to continue to follow my morning routine.
The flip side of that is that some new habits that you want to try out may not really work for you. Keeping track will help you notice if there's something specific you are struggling with, so that you can change that part of your routine.
The good thing about the SMART objectives that we set in lesson 4 is that they are measurable, they are designed for you to keep track, and you can easily see what you've achieved.
Let's talk about a few different ways to track your progress. There are many options, I will just offer a few examples:
The easiest thing to do is just make simple notes in your journal or diary. Write down the habit and add a tick next to it every time you do it, then every month, you can start over.
Similar to this, but a bit more time-consuming, would be to use a bullet journal. You can use this to create a beautiful and creative visual display of your habit and your progress, and you can personalise it to make it your own. You can spend hours on Instagram looking at different ways to create your own bullet journal.
Another method would be to colour things in your calendar, add a dot or a tick in a different colour for each habit, so that you can easily see what you've achieved just by seeing the different colours.
In my case, I use an app that allows me to track my habits. You create a list adding each of your habits and the frequency. Then you can tick every time you complete your task. I like this method because it's easy to use and it's always with me, even if I'm travelling, I can still easily keep track of my habits.
Reflect on these options and choose one that interests you to try it out. Then, spend a few minutes completing your tracker by adding each of your habits. You want to have it prepared for when you start your new routine tomorrow.
Once you have followed your routine for a few days, it will be very satisfying to check your progress and see how much you have achieved by following your habits regularly.
It's also a great tool to keep you motivated - when you see your progress over time, you will want to add more and more achievements to your tracker.
By creating a system to track your habits, your morning routine is complete. CONGRATULATIONS!
This was the final step in creating your new routine. But over time, you may want to change things around and improve it. Or you may have some problems or questions.
In the next lesson, we will talk about those things. I will share my favourite tips and hacks to make your routine even better and to help you stick with it in the long term.
I'll see you there!
