[rayalez]

Setting a theme for each month is an awesome idea!

Yes, I track these habits. There's an awesome app called TracknShare, super convenient. Here's how my list looks like: http://imgur.com/I9qK9iu

I measure writing by the number of words I write each day, and I measure CS in "Pomodoros"(from pomodoro technique, 20-minute-sized chunks of uninterrupted time).

Participating in /r/WritingPrompts really helps with daily writing. Prompts are a great place to start, and provide instant gratification, also it's really fun.

When I have an interesting and exciting project to work on - I can easily stay on top of CS, but if not it becomes super hard.

The main thing about healthy food - is just throwing away everything unhealthy, and replacing it wih a lot of delicious healthy alternatives. If I get hungry and I don't have some nuts/berries to chew on immediately - I know I will go and buy chocolate/pizza. So it's mostly about controlling my environment. If everything around me is healthy - it's not that hard to keep it up.

When it comes to coffee and reddit - I still haven't found a good solution, I'm addicted to that stuff.

Exercising isn't that hard to keep up, just set a goal that is easy enough to not be intimidating, and spend several days paying attention to it, because when I don't I simply forget.

[nefitty]

Awesome, so you're tracking daily streaks then? That helped me form my meditation habit pretty solidly. I also measure productivity in pomodoros! It's dope to meet other people as excited about this stuff as me. Since you shared I'll go ahead and show you how I have my ratings system set up. I'm using Google Sheets, tracking each metric daily and then at the end of each week I enter the average of the values or the sum, depending on what I'm measuring. I then turn that into graphs, which give my brain some nice feedback about its behavior haha hope you find this cool!

http://imgur.com/a/95cet

[nefitty]

@rayalez I couldn't reply directly to your last comment, the thread looks like it's too deep now. The biggest challenge is definitely the size and amount of things to track. If I slack on one day it's hard to pick up the pieces the next. The patterns are still hard to discern, but I'm definitely seeing that the biggest factor in my success day-to-day is amount and time of sleep. It's literally the biggest leverage point, so I'm investing more resources in perfecting that as well. The amount of projects that arise from this list of metrics can be overwhelming, so the ethos of "keep it simple" is the best way for me to make any headway.

If you ever want to continue this convo feel free to email me, it's my HN username at gmail. Maybe you could use an accountability partner or someone to bounce ideas off of? Either way, good luck with your project!

[rayalez]

Wow, this is very cool and detailed.

I've tried to simplify my list as much as possible, because many details are hard for me to keep in mind, and when I have too many things to track it's hard for me to focus. Now the list of things Im tracking doubles as my daily goal list.

But I'm sure your way creates a lot of interesting results. Did you notice some interesting patterns?

I also used to use Emacs org mode for that sort of thing, it was pretty convenient. It has a neat todo list function, so you can track things and have a list of daily goals separately. (though it won't create charts).

Also yeah, once I keep up with all my habits for like 30-60 days, I will add "Social" and maybe meditation. It's great that you're doing this, I found it very helpful.