October 5, 2020
There's an app for habit tracking, but you don't need it
The App Store led me to something really cool, but it wasn’t an app. It was a sheet of paper.
The App Store has all kinds of things for you to “discover” and one day it had a habit-tracking app. That sounded interesting, so I looked into it.
I can’t remember the name of the app, but they wanted a lot of money every month for the privilege of helping me form new habits. So I looked for similar apps that are free.
And they exist! But every single one of them wanted my email address. Why should I have to give up a little more of my privacy for something so simple?
Then I found out that you don’t need an app. You can buy an expensive journal instead.
You can see where this is going. Everything we do in life has become so commercialized that it’s almost impossible to find information about it without someone trying to extract money from you.
It’s not so much that I mind paying. It’s just the principle of thing. Is there no one in the world who just wants to be genuinely helpful?
So, anyway, about that sheet of paper. It turns out that there are stationery and paper companies that provide templates you can download as a PDF, then print off.
And yes, some of them demand an email address in return. Are they really that desperate for leads?
But others, happily, are plain old free. The one I like is from Evermore Paper Co. They only thing they get out of it is spreading the word about their business, which I am glad to do because their template is quite nice.
The sheet is a grid. The numbers for the days of the month are in a row across the top. In the first column is space for a list of habits that you would like to acquire. In the squares that intersect between the habit and the month number, you place an X or check mark if you have done the thing that day.
It is oddly satisfying to have a completed column of X’s each day. And so I have been building up new habits.
One of them is writing each day. If you’re reading this, you can thank my Evermore Paper Co. habit tracker. For me, it works. Maybe it will work for you, too.