Starting a Personal Habit Journal Is Easier Than You May Think

It’s easy to turn a Teamup calendar into your own personal Habit Journal for tracking daily habits such as exercise, eating healthy food, or reading. You can start with a brand new calendar. Or, if you haven’t done anything with the Welcome calendar on your dashboard, use it to build better habits. You are the calendar administrator, so you have the full power to reconfigure it and make it truly personal.

With a few quick clicks, you will have a simple yet powerful personal habit tracker, accessible any time, and synced across all your digital devices. Let’s take a look at an example.

 

The Make Over

To create a personal habit journal, consider these steps in your calendar Settings:

  • Add or rename the sub-calendars if needed. Go to Settings > Calendars and rename each sub-calendar for a habit you wish to track. Add more sub-calendars if you want to track more habits. Choose the colors for each as you wish. For a simple start, track one habit only and deactivate any other sub-calendars.
  • Rename the calendar title. If you start with the Welcome Calendar, you can change the title to something more meaningful, e.g. My Habit Journal. Do so in Settings > Identity.
  • Create a custom field. Use a custom field to show the status of your habit tracker. You could create a choice field with the a single option for “I did it.” Assign an emoji and choose to show it in the event title. This would eliminate any typing but only clicks when you update your status.
  • Create recurring events. Recurring events are the placeholders for your daily habits. You can leave the event title empty and set to display the habit calendar name in the event title.  The recurring events are a visual reminder on your calendar to complete your habit at your preferred interval.

To track multiple habits, add more sub-calendars. Assign one for each habit you want to track. That’s all you need to do to start habit journaling on your Teamup calendar.

Here’s an example of tracking three habits:

  • Exercise
  • Eating healthy food
  • Reading

With a free Teamup calendar, you can use up to 8 sub-calendars and 1 custom field. You can do a lot of habit tracking with 8 sub-calendars! That’s all you need for a simple and free habit tracker. If you are a power user, you can optimize more details in the calendar Settings to fine-tune your journal setup. You can even upgrade to get more calendar capabilities, like uploading images and using additional custom fields.

Journaling on a Mobile Device

Teamup is Software as a Service, meaning that it’s accessible anywhere, anytime with a web browser–on any connected computer. And it’s also accessible on your other digital devices. You probably have your smartphone in hand most of the time; keep better track of habits by updating your habit journal right on your phone!

With Teamup’s iOS app or Android app, you can easily do so. All updates are instantly synced across all your devices.

Quick Taps to Track Your Habits

5 taps habit tracker
Note down “I did it” in 10 seconds
  1. Tap the placeholder event for the current day.
  2. Tap the edit button in the lower right hand corner.
  3. Tap the Habit Tracker field.
  4. Select “I did it” and tap the check icon in the top right hand to save.
  5. Tap the check icon in the top right hand again and select This event only to save your updated status.

For Teamup Power Users

You can keep your habit journal simple, or you can expand and customize your setup. Teamup offers expandable space–more than any journal entry may ever need–for you to capture the details of what you experience, be it words or pictures, at length.

A special moment you don’t want to let elapse? Take a picture and include it in your journal! Is that something on a piece of paper important to not leave out? Use your camera to capture it and add to your journal! Reading a Kindle book? Keep your reading notes right in the journal.

Here’s an example: These beautiful pictures taken from a morning run were added to the day’s Exercise journal, right from an iPhone.

Don’t Break the Chain

Building habits takes time. One piece of widely shared advice is best expresssed in Jerry Seinfeld’s Don’t Break the Chain method. However, instead of tracking your habit chain on a printed annual calendar, use the habit journal. You can easily do so with Teamup as a simple digital alternative to help you not break the chain.

Switch to the Year view on a browser (or any period of interest), then filter by “I did it” on your Habit Journal to show the days you “did it,” as shown below:

The Habit Journal for daily exercise started in September 2021. See an updated snapshot through January 2022.

It’s satisfying to see your progress in a big picture. Be proud of yourself for creating a better life. Happy habit building and journaling!

 

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