TIL my habit tracker was actually lying to me for 6 months

I finally figured out why my habit tracker looked so perfect every month... I was filling it in at the end of the week from memory, not actually doing the stuff. It took me realizing I 'completed' reading 30 minutes daily for 4 months straight to see something was off. Turns out I was just guessing and rounding up. Has anyone else caught themselves faking their own bullet journal without meaning to?

2 comments

2 Comments

tessawebb1d ago

Oh man, I've been there (though with a different system, not a bullet journal). I had this whole elaborate spreadsheet for tracking my water intake and I'd just fill in 8 glasses at 11pm based on what I thought I drank that day. The worst part was I had a column for "mood" too, and I'd just put "good" every time because I couldn't remember if I was grumpy on Tuesday or whatever. It was basically data fan fiction at that point. My fix was to set a specific time each day (right after lunch, when I was already sitting down) to update it. That way I only had about 6 hours of stuff to remember, not a whole week. Also, I stopped tracking things I didn't actually care about - just the 2-3 most important habits, nothing crazy. You'll save yourself a lot of fake perfection that way.

josephf101d ago

Wait, did you say "data fan fiction"? Because that's exactly what I was doing with my sleep log. I was filling in "7.5 hours, restful" every single morning even though I'd been up at 3am scrolling Twitter for an hour. My poor bullet journal thought I was the most disciplined person alive when really I was just too lazy to admit I wasn't sleeping well. Now I just write "bad sleep" and leave it at that, which feels a lot more honest even if it looks terrible on the page.