A few years ago, I read about Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” method of productivity. Meanwhile, my wife and I were trying to build a better exercise ethic, and I decided to apply the method that Seinfeld popularized.
I went to the hardware store, bought one of those big panels of blackboard material, cut it to size, and mounted it on a wall in the hallway of our house. I drew out a grid of 12 columns and 31 rows – enough to cover every day of the year. Then I assigned my wife and I each a color of chalk, and for each day we did a focused exercise, we got to cross off our half of the checkbox.
Almost immediately, this process turned into a post-workout reward. Like a fighter pilot that paints their kills onto the side of their plane, it felt like we had found a physical way to show our progress, and we both started working out a whole lot more. So much that we ran our first race this year – the Ragnar Northwest Passage.
The difference was making the progress highly visible every day. A checkbox in a notebook wouldn’t have been enough. An app or digital tracker lacked the tangible satisfaction. Instead it’s a giant, can’t-miss board that we see every morning when we wake up, and every evening when we go to bed.
There’s obviously more to building strong habits than using a habit tracker, but this small step has had a clear impact on us building a habit that lasts.
P.S. I just finished reading Atomic Habits which reinforced a lot of the lessons I’ve learned on habit formation. If you’re trying to build a new habit, or ditch an undesirable one, I highly recommend giving it a read.