Day 6 of 7: How You Can Make the Best of Everyday

by Joan Boixadós

Aaaah, we are almost there!! One last push and we've got this!

During this series, we have distilled several tricks or ways in which we use and experiment with Everyday to form good habits. Here, we ellaborate a bit further on some of them. However, we are afraid of being too opinionated, we know productivity and lifestyle is a very personal thing and so you should only take these ideas as inspiration to find what best works for you.

We are inspired by the philosophy of bullet journaling, and have tried to keep the essence of paper habit tracking. We have focused on keeping Everyday as flexible as possible, so be creative and experiment with it! We will love to hear about how you use it!

And it is this ease of use and beauty that is at the core of our values. Habit tracking is not a chore but a source of motivation. The window to your future better self.

In this regard, it's important that you get rid of performance anxiety. Have enough clarity of mind to realize that there are only wins. That's why we only mark when we succeed! If the board doesn't look as you'd like, that's just an opportunity to analyse what to improve!

One of the toughest experiences within the app is when we break our first solid chain. It's at that moment that we really appreciate what we had built. Even though you will need to decide by yourself, we found it particularly helpful to use a "skip" (the triangle that appears on second tap) to give us a second chance. If we have really understood The Power of Streaks, we will certainly regain our presence on the next day and get back on track.

A word of caution though, abusing skips is counterproductive and might defeat the whole purpose. That's why we recommend against using it lightly. Try limiting the number of skips you can use.

Of course skips weren't originally thought for this purpose but to keep streaks that got broken for reasons out of our control, think of not running on a rainy day or not doing push-ups while ill.

Organizing your board

The board offers an at-a-glance overview of everything you are trying to do. And it also allows to easily mark today and previous days easily. This power has led people to use the different following approaches at the time to organize the habits within their board:

  • Schedule: Organizing your board as a schedule is very handy because it lists the habits chronologically. This way you always know what's next. By defining a specific time to each habit, not only you are being more specific, but it also forces you to previously allocate a moment for each habit. You can then use reminders for those habits that are proving harder to tackle.
    This organization comes in very handy when you form the habit to check the app once a day, since it becomes a checklist that you chronologically have to go through. Only when the daily completion rate goes above 80%, may you think about adding a new habit.

  • Habit Stacks: This is an evolution of the previous strategy. The idea is to group the habit stacks by colour with the spearhead habit being first. You can sort the habits by dragging them up or down. This way you can see which stacks you are doing good at and which ones need more of your attention.

  • By Goal: The idea here is to have "goals" as habits, for example "get fit" or "save more". Since these are not achievable daily actions, we put them in a specific colour and list all those habits that help us reach such goal below. Only if we achieve one of the subhabits are we allowed to mark the goal habit. It's very easy to build strong streaks for these, which gives us an awesome momentum!

  • By Category: In this strategy we basically group habits by categories and choose a specific colour for each category.

  • Affirmations list: This came to us a bit as a surprise. One of the strengths of using Everyday is that it makes us go through the very same list every day, reminding us of what we want to do. Sometimes, however, not all we want to be reminded about are actions we need to perform but ideas we need to reflect on. Principles, personal values and philosophical quotes that we want to become part of us.

On colour coding

As you've already noticed by now, one of the most motivating aspects of Everyday is to see our streak increase in color forming a beautiful gradient. The darkening of the colour is meant to represent the strenghtening of our habit. That's why we conceived the inversion of this, when the colour slowly decreases in tone as the colour coding for breaking habits. They are slowly fading away... ;D However, you are free to use them and give the meaning that best suits you. A part of the community prefer to see as the brighter colours a metaphor for the blooming of their habits!

Conclusion

We hope you've have had some new ideas and understand how to use the app better now. Again, we encourage you to be creative and find new ways that work for you to personally grow.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

Just one last day to go!

See you tomorrow!