35 Habit Tracker Ideas for Your Planner or Bullet Journal

Do you want to change your life? Do you want to spend your time better and learn some good habits that will help you reach your goals? If so, I recommend you start using habit trackers. And for that, I have quite a few habit tracker ideas for you.

Building a new habit sounds very simple (and it can be that), but often we decide on changing our habits on a whim, which means that the chance of sticking to the habit is low. If you barely have a plan and simply think that it would be a good idea to exercise more, it’s very likely that you will forget all about your goal by tomorrow.

Habit trackers are a great way to stick to your plan and make the whole process of changing your life more rewarding.

What is a habit tracker?

A habit tracker is a very simple tool you can use to track your habits. At its simplest, it can be a plain grid in which you mark a little x every day you complete your habit.

If you want to do something extra and make your habit tracker look a bit nicer, you of course can. Especially bullet journal users like to make their habit trackers look fun and pretty. You can find countless ideas online on how to make your habit trackers and bullet journal pages look really good.

But if you want to find ideas on what to actually track, keep reading. At the end of the post, you can also sign up for my newsletter and get a free habit tracker printable.

Why you need to use habit trackers

I am all about goals and personal development and that’s why I love building new habits. You can use habit tracking for both building new good habits and quitting bad habits.

If you want to change your life and implement new habits into your daily routine, you need to know exactly what you are supposed to do and how often you are supposed to do it. The tracker will help you with this. It will also make it much more rewarding to cook healthy food, write a blog post, water plants, or whatever else you want to track, even when you feel like doing nothing.

Another good thing about habit trackers is that they help you understand how you spend your time and how often you actually complete your habits. Not everything on your list necessarily needs to be done every day, but you still want to do those things regularly to make some progress.

Weekly, monthly, or yearly habit tracker?

There are many different kinds of habit trackers you can use. What works best depends on the habit. If you want to build better sleep habits, it might make sense to have a sleep tracker that covers the whole year, so that you can see how the seasons or perhaps your work affects your sleep.

If you decide to brush up on your Spanish, you could challenge yourself to study for an hour every day for a month. Monthly habit trackers are great for monthly goals like this. A weekly habit tracker will work especially well when you’re not quite sure what habits would really help you, so you decide to try a few to see what will happen and how many habits you can build at the same time.

Most of the time, it’s best to use yearly habit trackers only for very simple habits, like flossing. Things that take more than a couple of minutes to do or that really don’t need to be done every day, can become overwhelming over time. Even if you want to become fluent in Spanish as fast as possible, it’s good to take a break sometimes and not even think about the whole language for a couple of weeks.

35 Habit tracker ideas

There are plenty of habits you can track, each of which will help you improve in a certain area of life. Choose a few things from the following list of habit tracker ideas and write them down in your bullet journal or on a piece of paper.

Make sure to have your habit tracker somewhere where you have easy access to it and where you will definitely see it every day so that you won’t forget about all those good new daily habits that you are building.

Personal and self-development habits

1. Say three things you are grateful for
2. Write morning pages
3. Read for 30 minutes
4. Give yourself a pep talk
5. Don’t look at your phone before 9 am

Productivity habits

6. Work on your goal or project for 1 hour
7. Tidy up your workspace
8. No procrastinating all day
9. Study for 1 hour

Work habits

10. Answer your emails
11. Share an idea at a meeting
12. Say something nice to a coworker
13. No gossiping with coworkers
14. Reach your daily target

Healthy habits

15. Eat a piece of fruit
16. Drink water
17. Take your vitamins
18. Don’t eat junk food
19. Make a smoothie
20. Go for a walk
21. Do pilates or yoga
22. Stretch
23. Take 5000/10 000 steps

Social habits

24. Send a message to a friend
25. Reach out to someone interesting
26. Invite someone over
27. Go to an event
28. Reach out to an old friend
29. Spend quality time with a family member

Social media habits

Social media can both help you reach your goals and distract you from them. That’s why there are two different kinds of habit tracker ideas in this section. Some will help you spend less time online and focus on things that you should be spending your time on, while others help you stay on track with your social media accounts.

30. Max. 30 minutes of social media
31. Unfollow 1 account
32. Post an Instagram post
33. Post a Tiktok video
34. Comment on 5 posts
35. Share what you’re doing on Instagram stories

Some extra tips for building new habits

While changing your daily routine sounds easy, it can sometimes feel super difficult, especially if you already have a lot going on in your life. There are a few things you can do to make it more likely that you will stick to your new habits and actually change your life.

1. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t do your habits sometimes

You are human, you don’t need to be perfect. It’s ok to have a couple of missed days in your tracker. Habits are not some sort of a game where the goal is to cross every square in the tracker. The whole point is to slowly but surely build new useful habits that will help you get in the direction you want to go.

Of course, the more consistent you can be, the better, but you didn’t fail just because you didn’t eat any fruit on Thursday.

2. Ask yourself what is not working

Personal growth is a lifelong journey and there will rarely be any quick wins when it comes to growing as a person. It takes time to figure out what kind of daily routine works for you or how you can get yourself to become more efficient.

The best way to make sure that what you’re doing is actually working is to review your progress on a regular basis and ask yourself what isn’t working. Try to come up with new ways to make the system work better.

3. Make it as easy as possible to do your habit

It’s very easy to decide on a new good habit, but it’s also easy to give up on it. That’s exactly why people have such a hard time changing anything in their lives. What you need to do, is to make it as easy as possible to do your new habits.

First of all, you need to make sure that the habit is clear, simple, and doable. Secondly, you should try to remove distractions and thirdly, you should never forget what is your end goal.

4. Leave yourself clues

To make it easier to remember to do your habits, leave yourself some clues. For example, if you want to increase your water intake, have a water bottle on your desk. Or if you want to start jogging every morning, leave your running shoes where you can see them. It’s much easier to remember to do something when you leave yourself little reminders.

5. Do the habits as challenges

When you decide on a new habit, you don’t have to commit to it forever. You can simply challenge yourself to do something for a month or two. For example, writing challenges are supposed to help you get some writing done, but there’s no need to keep up with the same pace forever.

In the best-case scenario, sticking to your daily and monthly habits will help you learn to do something automatically without even thinking about it (like eating more fruit) or give up some bad habits, like spending too much time on social media.

6. Reward yourself

While looking at your beautifully filled and decorated bullet journal spreads is rewarding in itself, it definitely helps to promise yourself some real rewards for a job well done. The rewards don’t need to be big or even tangible.

You could simply reward yourself with a hike in a beautiful forest or go to your favorite park for a couple of hours. Or if you are a Harry Potter fan, why not have a Harry Potter movie marathon at the end of a successful week?

Conclusion

If you want to get somewhere in life, building some new habits is definitely a great idea. Whether you have fitness goals or financial goals you want to work on or you simply want to increase your water consumption, having a habit tracker is possibly the easiest way to do just that.

Changing your life is hard work, there’s no way around that. But using productivity tools such as habit trackers takes off some of the mental load. You don’t even need to think about what you should do when you already have a good plan in place and a list of habits you know will help you get closer to the future you want.

And the best part is that making a simple habit tracker is really fast. It takes very little time to draw one (and even less time to print one), so you really have no excuse not to. If you want to build better habits, you should get started on your weekly or monthly tracker right away.

Remember to put it somewhere where you won’t forget about it so that you will for sure complete all your daily tasks every single day. And review your progress on a monthly basis, so that you can make changes to your routine if needed.

I hope this article inspired you to start building some new habits! If this is your first time creating a habit tracker, make sure to keep it simple. Let me know which habits you will start tracking and share this post on social media if you found it useful!

If you are serious about changing your life, sign up for my motivational newsletter! You will get helpful emails and productivity tips twice a month and a free monthly habit tracker printable when you sign up!