A few weeks ago, I went from sharing general information on the Lights Spreadsheet by week to going to a specific theme.
If you're tuning in new here, it's something I do to stay on track with habits. It works as a great way to both control behavior and a warning for when things are getting off-track. The colors offer a surprising motivational boost: the desire to get one's "green light" and avoid "getting a red light" seem to come universally to people who adopt it.
Now, for a decision I made when I first started:
There are no notes or narratives contained on my habit-tracking spreadsheet.
Thus, there's no narrative, no context, and no backstory.
For instance, I took a red-eye flight leaving Istanbul's Ataturk Airport on the evening of 1st July. I woke up and changed airplanes at Dubai at 12:30AM on 2nd July. I arrived in Taipei on the evening of 2nd July.
This perfectly explain why 2nd July gets hit with red lights and fallings-off.
Note: there's no place on the spreadsheet to note that down.
Of course, if I'm really curious as to why behavior happened, I can go back and look at other records: my calendar, my daily notes, or whatever.
But I intentionally leave it off the sheet.
Why?
Because I don't want my standard to be "...do my habits, if it's reasonable."
It's somewhat unreasonable to expect to stay on top of things in the middle of a transit day, after waking from a brief 3 hour sleep at 12:30AM, and where the clock is going to jump forward a bunch of hours due to timezone shift.
That's precisely the kind of unreasonable standard I want to have.
In fact, I can tell you with reasonable certainty that both 1st July and 2nd July would have been more likely to have a lot more red lights (missed habits) if I'd had a notes field on this sheet.
Three months from now, I won't remember exactly what my travel days were. I'll look at the sheet, and see some red lights.
Had the day been "all red" — all key habits missed — I'd look at that and wonder why, muse that it could have been a few different things, and then been a little dismayed to see it.
However, if there was "Transit Day: Istanbul to Taipei via Dubai, red eye flight" or something similar listed on the sheet, I'd be more likely to say, "Oh, well, okay... I missed a bunch of habits, but of course it's hard to be on top of them while traveling."
I did fitness in the airport and wrote on the airplane. To be quite frank, the reason I did so is probably motivated far less by "the actual desire to do the habit" (whatever that means) and far more from "jeez, I don't want to take too many red lights."
Sounds silly — maybe it is silly — but that visual representation of success and failure is motivating.
Likewise, not having any field for notes means there's nowhere I can tell a narrative or a story. The spreadsheet just tells me: did I do it or not? That's it. That's the only information contained there.
There's no narrative, no context. There's no story. Thus, there can be no rationalization and no excuses.
Some days and weeks, some things will be missed. Fair enough, that's fine. But those will be represented solely by core habits getting missed, and not for any good reason.
Be careful with your narratives! They give way to excuses easily. I'm not advocating "no notes" — it depends on what you're going for — but for me, this is primarily about about getting the core stuff to happen regularly. I don't want any possible excuse as to why it would be okay to neglect the stuff I want to do, regardless of how plausible or accurate it might be.