Day 5: Retiring Habits

This is the fifth day of the Habitspark 7-day Jumpstart. You’re more than half-way through, great work!

Retiring Habits

Besides dropping habits because you’ve missed three days out of seven, you’ll also want to stop tracking habits for other reasons.  You may decide the habit is no longer useful to keep.  For example, you might have a habit of reviewing your notes after each class, which might no longer make sense after you’ve stopped school.  Alternatively, a habit may have become very strong and you may decide you no longer need to track it.  A recommended stop point is once you have hit 120 days in a row.  At this point, the habit should be very firmly entrenched.  A good way to tell if a habit is solid is if you find it harder NOT to keep the habit than to keep it.  You’ll also find that if you miss a day or two, you start feeling uncomfortable and naturally returning to the habit.

To retire a habit, put a * next to the habit and draw a squiggly line where you stop tracking.

As you can see in the example above, when you retire a habit, you can start a new one.

Using the fancy excel spreadsheet, simply put a * in the Retire column

You can filter out the retired habits by clicking on the arrow above the Retire column and deselecting the checkbox next to the *

Super, you’re almost a Habitspark master. Come back tomorrow for Day 6.