I Tracked My Habits Every Day for a Year - Here’s What I Learned

You know that book “10% Happier” - about how meditation can increase your happiness by ten percent? Well, that’s not true for me.

Meditation makes me 5.238% happier. I also know that doing something creative makes me 4.263% happier and listening to a podcast on my walk to work makes me 1.629% happier.

I know these things because I’ve been tracking my habits and happiness every day for an entire year. And after doing this for a year, I've become much more intentional about how I spend my time and what I do with my days.

Why I did this.

I wanted to determine what habits contribute to my happiness. But not just what habits, I was interested in knowing the frequency of doing each habit and what combination of habits would lead to greater happiness. Does exercising make me happier? If so, am I happiest when I exercise three or four times a week?

We all have theories about what will make us happier. For example, many of us say that we want to read more. But besides the satisfaction of accomplishing your goal, do you know if reading more actually makes you happier? Maybe instead of reading at home four nights a week, you’d be happier reading three nights and going to a class the other night.

Doing this kind of self-reflective tracking can test our theories. It can provide evidence of how our small, daily behaviors impact our happiness. It can allow us to change our habits to be more intentional of how we spend our time and be happier. Even if it is 1.629% happier.

How I tracked each day.

To me, the blank page of a journal is daunting. I either end up doodling food I’d like to eat or not doing it at all.

I like numbers. And spreadsheets. And statistically significant correlations with conditional color scales.

So I began by breaking down the different habits and activities in my life that I believed contribute to my happiness. I chose five categories:

• Health
• Learning
• Productivity
• Creativity
• Social

Within each category, I selected daily activities or habits. For example, for Health, I tracked eating healthy, exercise, sleep, and meditation. For Learning, I tracked reading, listening to a podcast, and attending a class/workshop. And so on for the remaining categories.

I then created a simple Google Survey with a yes/no question for each activity. Did I exercise today? Yes/No. Did I spend time with friends today? Yes/No. Did I read today? Yes/No.

The final question is a rating of my happiness that day between one and ten.

At the end of each day, I completed the survey. 15 questions total. About 20 seconds to complete. Those survey responses pull into a Google Sheet that compiles the results into a week-by-week tracker and dashboard.

After several weeks of doing this, I began identifying targets that I’d like to hit for each activity (e.g. I’d like to spend time with friends three times a week). Throughout the year, I’d analyze the impact that the habits and frequency of habits were having on my happiness and adjust my behavior accordingly.

By no means did I track everything that contributes to happiness. Things like stress, weather, world events, travel, etc. are all big contributors. But many of those things I can not control, so for the purpose of habit change, I did not track them.

What I learned.

Looking back on the past year, I’ve learned some things about my own happiness. For example, I learned that some habits, like reading, eating healthy, or doing cardio, don’t make me happier that day, but they do make me happier the next day.

I’ve also learned a level of detail for each individual habit that some might call, “a bit much.” Including:

• Getting 8 hours of sleep - 11.6% increase in daily happiness
• Checking something off to-do list - 6.4% increase
• Meeting someone new I like - 5.0% increase
• Exercise/workout - 4.9% increase
• Spending time with family - 4.5% increase

But the biggest thing I’ve taken away from doing this is evidence. Evidence of what habits make me happy so that I know how best to spend my time and schedule my week.

Whether you’ve made a New Year’s resolution or you’re just interested in continuous self-improvement, I highly recommend doing this exercise for at least a month.

If you’d like to try this method for yourself, fill out this form or send me a message.