This Dumb Little Postcard Helps Me Build New Habits
How to track your routines when the idea of tracking anything fills you with existential dread
I have never been someone who enjoys organizing, de-cluttering, or doing anything administrative. I am comfortable with some level of chaos and my inclination to impose order on it is fairly selective. I want structure for big projects and tasks (running an organization day-to-day, getting long-term projects with a lot of moving parts done), but I’m ambivalent about the micro stuff.
So while I know that habit tracking helps habits stick, it’s always felt to me like one more administrative thing to do. Even opening an app has been too much of a chore. (The things that seem tedious to me are admittedly arbitrary and I have a very low threshold for irritation on that front.)
But last year, after reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, I tried to figure out why it was so fucking painful for me to keep track of habits on a daily basis. Then I remembered something an ex-boyfriend of mine used to do: He had a to-do list that he wrote out on a blank pad every day, and every time he completed…
