Making a Habit Scorecard

As promised in my last post – I have put together a habit scorecard!

Actually, I’ve made a few, separating them into different sections of the day/different routines that I can assign them to.

If you are interested in learning more about this, I recommend James Clear’s book ‘Atomic Habits’, or he has a website and blog that will have further information.

The recommendation given for making your own habit scorecard is to try and be as specific as possible to small details, which I have tried to do

But of course unless you have an already functioning exact routine, what you do each and every day can vary quite dramatically.

I’ve made a lot of effort over the last couple of years to establish good morning and night routines, so that already helps me to be fairly consistent.

Also, weekdays are far easier to have a routine (particularly a functional routine) due to the already established structure of having to be prepared for work.

Below is my current average routine on a weekday morning.

Daily Habits	Positive (+), Negative (-). Or Neutral (=)
Wake up	+
Snooze Alarm	–
Turn off alarm	+
Get out of bed	+
Drink water	+
Get my phone and check for messages	=
Weigh myself	+
Get back into bed	–
Go through phone (instagram)	–
Get out of bed	+
Put on workout clothes	+
Get out Yoga Mat/stuff for exercising	+
Exercise	+
Put away stuff for exercising	+
Drink water	+
Make breakfast	+
Make and pack lunchbox	=
Find a video on Youtube	–
Eat breakfast	=
?Play games?	–
Get ready to shower	=
Shower	+
Clean down shower screen	+
Brush teeth	+
Choose clothes for the day	=
Get dressed/dry hair	=
Pack work bag	=
Put in headphones	=
Check pockets for keys	+
Leave for work	+

To make the scorecard you break-down your actions as far as possible, and then you assign each action as ‘positive’, ‘negative’, or ‘neutral’ based upon how they align with helping you to become the person that you want to be.

As you can see, even just my morning scorecard is quite an extensive list, so I’m not going to put them all on here, the above is a good example though.

I had procrastinated doing this scorecard because I felt that my routines, and particularly my morning routine, was going very badly at the minute.

I discussed this in my last post, I feel like my routines have fallen apart a bit during this latest lockdown with it being dark and cold and there not being a gym to attend to hold me accountable to a set time to be out of bed in the morning.

It could certainly be better, but looking at it laid out like it is, it’s not actually as bad as I thought it was.

I think that I got it stuck in my head that I do currently hit ‘snooze’ on my alarm and crawl back into my warm bed with my phone – these are definitely ‘negative’ habits, but I still manage to keep a lot of my ‘positive’ habits too.

There are also a few items in the list that I have listed as ‘neutral’ but definitely still have places for improvement.

For example, making my lunch and packing my bag for the day might be habits that would be better done the night before for productivity and efficiency. But they are not negative actions and they are necessary ones, so I have labelled them as neutral.

I already knew which were my current bad habits that I need to shake in my morning routine, now I need to actually start actively replacing these habits for better ones.

Writing out the scorecards has made me realise that I don’t have many routines for my workday, and also that my weekends are relatively unstructured.

These are definitely places where I can make a lot of improvements just by putting some active thought and planning into my days.

But that would probably be a topic for another blog.

For now, I’m going to try and improve my scorecards, either by replacing the ‘negatives’ or by figuring out how I can set more structure to aid in productivity without making my life too rigid to be manageable or enjoyable (it might be a tricky balance)

Wish me luck, but until next time I hope that you all have a happy, productive and safe week.