How To Use The Habit Journal
Morning Thoughts
Each morning we encourage you to take a phone-free period, when you first wake up, to sit with your thoughts. If you are new to journaling, this is a simple and effective way to build a practice into your daily routine. What you share is up to you. You may want to consider one of the prompts below to start you off,
or perhaps share a quote or affirmation.
Daily prompts you may wish to consider:
- How are you feeling today?
- What are you excited about at the moment?
- What is something you can do for you today?
- What or who is inspiring you right now?
- What reminder do you want to give yourself today?
- What small step can you take to work toward reaching a goal today?
Daily to-do list
You’ve set yourself up for a positive start to the day by reflecting on your morning thoughts. Next, it’s time to move on to writing down your daily to-do list to help organise your thoughts and focus your attention. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you need to achieve in a day but by prioritizing your tasks in order of importance will provide more clarity with where you should start first. Consider your must-do’s [high priority] vs your could do’s [low priority]. For this reason we have dedicated a section for your most important task(s) of the day and then a separate to-do list for both work and your personal life.
Celebrating the mini wins
Mini wins lead to big results. Just as we encourage starting the day in a positive mindset with morning thoughts, it’s important to take a moment at the end of the day to reflect on the things that you have achieved that day. This can be however small or big as you like, for example it may be that you completed a project you were working on or it may be that you got outside for a lunchtime run, or maybe it was just answering that email you were putting off. If you’re struggling with something to write, use this as an opportunity to share something positive that happened that day.
Practising gratitude
Practicing gratitude is one of the most under-appreciated tools for our health and wellbeing. Before switching off for the day, perhaps when you get into bed, take a few moments to write down something you’re grateful for.
Weekly Review and Reflection
Weekly reviews are a great opportunity to prepare and organise yourself for the week ahead, and reflect on some learnings from the week that you’ve just completed. We all have good and bad days so looking at a 7-day average is a more helpful gauge of how much progress you’re making and have made. This is often best done on a Sunday morning - pour yourself your favourite hot beverage, perhaps curl up on the sofa or back in bed, and really take your time to do this practice.
You should approach your weekly tasks in much the same way as you would
approach your daily tasks, by writing them down in priority of importance and identifying what your main goal for the week is.
When reviewing the week, I have left you with some questions to reflect on;
- What went well for me this week?
- Something I learned this week
- What did I do for myself this week?
- What do I want to work on next week?
Monthly Habit Tracker
A habit tracker in its basic form is exactly what the name suggests: a way to help you track how well you’re sticking with the daily habits you’re trying to build. There is space for 3 daily habits, while you may have only one habit you want to pick up, we wanted to give you the space for more. These should be specific to you and what you want to achieve. Here are some examples:
- Want to spend less time on your phone? Try a phone free hour in the mornings when you first wake up or last thing before bed at night.
- Want to read more? Leave a book beside your bed and aim to read 10 pages per night.
- Want to integrate daly movement into your day? Block out 30 minutes in your day to do some form of physical activity that you enjoy whether that’s a walk, run, or gym session.
