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How to Set Up A ClickUp Habit Tracker Yourself? READ ON!
In this ClickUp guide, even beginners will quickly learn how to use and make their own interactive ClickUp habit tracker… NOT just for your personal training, life, and productivity but also to help you with staying productive in your business.
First things first, what is a Habit?
A habit is a recurrent and often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.
Habits can be hard to break because they often happen automatically, so we need to take special care with the things we want to change.
A habit is something you do as if you’re on autopilot, it’s something that you do over and over and allows you to achieve a consistent result.
Ex. Brushing your teeth regularly is a habit. You know how to brush your teeth and when you do, you consistently get a consistent result – fresh breath and sparkly teeth!
5 Reasons Why Tracking Habits is Important for Building Better Habits
In case you aren’t convinced yet to track your habits, here are 5 reasons why tracking them is important:
1. It helps you put a plan in place. Without a plan, it’s easy to get off course and lose motivation for building better habits.
2. You can monitor your progress easily using ClickUp – whether that progress is slow or fast, expected or unexpected. Having access to this information, this historical data, of what’s worked so far and where there might be room to improve will help keep you motivated towards reaching your goals!
3. Tracking brings awareness of how much time goes into each habit as well as the action steps needed to accomplish those tasks. By focusing on one habit at a time, you can give that habit the amount of energy and attention it needs to become second nature to you.
4. Tracking your habits allows you to develop a sense of pride in a job well done and keep track of small wins, which will help build confidence going forward. Don’t underestimate the power of having that sense of progress!
5. Finally, tracking habits helps ensure that you’ll be able to see patterns so you can either replicate success or alter negative patterns moving forward.
Why some CLICKUP HABIT TRACKERS WORK & Some Don't
A lot of you have messaged me asking for advice because building a habit tracker in ClickUp proved to be a struggle to do on your own, and it doesn’t help when some of the tutorials out there tend to make things too fancy vs user-friendly.
That’s one of the things I wanted to address in this guide because, one of the pitfalls of building better habits is the lack of ease and innovation.
No matter how much you want to stick with your goals, it’s hard when the process isn’t streamlined.
So, if you’ve already tried other ClickUp Habit Trackers before and it hasn’t worked for you, here are the possible culprits:
- Your plan was too complicated. You may have tried to track everything at once, which doesn’t help you focus on what’s important.
- Accessibility! Where is it? Where do I click to use the habit tracker again? This might be counterintuitive if your habit tracker is not front and center. With the right habit tracker and goal tracker, you want to make it as easy possible for yourself to focus on the task at hand.
- Having too many different tools to track your habits can overcomplicate things. You’ll be constantly shifting your attention—making it a lot more difficult to stay focused and motivated.
What makes a good habit “stick”?
- connects with other good habits
- makes you feel good about yourself
- easy to implement dailay
- easy to monitor progress
- easy to celebrate the habit (month vs day)
- easy to set up
- easily to accessible
Why use a ClickUp Habit tracker?
Now, don’t get us wrong – I believe that you can definitely build better habits without even without my ClickUp Habit Tracker.
But it wouldn’t hurt to learn another way to track your habits, right?
So, if you’re interested in automating the whole process, then this is for you!
I’m going to share exactly how I used ClickUp to automate my habit building and change my lifestyle by applying these scientifically proven ideas of building better habits.
(Pssssst!! New to ClickUp? Make sure you check out this resource!)
How to Make an Interactive Habit Tracker with ClickUp
ClickUp a habit tracker is both super accessible and easy to use. Whether you’re on a computer, tablet or phone – using ClickUp is always going to be a pleasant experience!
To set up your own interactive habit tracker, follow these steps:
ClickUp Habit Tracker Setup (overview):
- 1 task with the Habit due date set to the last day of the month.
- Subtask = # of Days You’re Building The Habit
- Set this Template up good for 31 Days, and then copy + adjust per month depending on your objective.
- Use Remap Due Dates so you don’t have to manually type in the dates again when you set a task (habit) to recur.
- Sync with Google Calendar, if you like.
[Pro Tip: When syncing with GCal, make your time adjustments inside ClickUp calendar first. Changing the time in GCal doesn’t affect CU and can be annoying when the specific habit slot changes.]
Board View:
Steps on How to Build a Habit Tracker in ClickUp
1. Create a folder & a List for your habits.
So, I have just 1 habits folder and 1 list to house all of the habits I want to build.
If you want to build out on that setup, go for it, I literally just need one list in here to be able to build up on this and really track my habits.
2. Create a task… 1 task = 1 habit.
You read that right! ONE task means ONE habit. This allows you to really focus on developing that one specific habit, but also efficiently tracking that one specific habit.
So in this case, my main task is for WORKING OUT.
3. Create the subtasks based on the number of days you’re tracking this habit.
I have the subtasks under my main task with those specific work out dates.
Pro Tip: here’s where the magic starts to happen! If you are building a template this way, you can easily just use your process field that automatically tracks for you how far in you are on your habit, and simply choose the subtasks right in here.
Field Name: Monthly Goal
Track Completion of: Subtasks, checklists
Tasks Without Action Items: Display 100% when tasks is in a done status.
So, if I’ve done that workout. I mark it complete. Cool! It will show you how many percent your progress is at.
4. Adjust the subtasks based on your needs.
What if you don’t want to work out every single day?
Honestly, when you are starting with a workout habit, you should try to avoid setting the goal at seven days a week. Start small and start steady. Set the goal to maybe three days a week so that you actually can build up on it. And don’t beat yourself up because you have a down day. Everyone has days where they just want to chill on the couch, right?
The good thing about this setup is that you build this template once, with whatever habit that is, and you’ll be able to duplicate it easily.
I decided to go through from Day 1 down all the way to Day 31. So that I can just make the adjustments as I go, “You know what, on the 16th, I’m not gonna work out. Or on the 21, I’m not gonna walk out. On 25th, I’m not gonna work out.”
Just delete those dates. That’s how easy it becomes to adjust your habit tracker to your schedule!
5. Set the due date of your habit on the last day of the month.
With my workout habit, I only set up six days for this. The final due date of the main habit is the last day of your month.
So, set it up for a month that has 31 days just to be sure it’s all working fine.
And then you set up your sub tasks with those due dates and the time you actually want to implement this habit. This helps ensure that this habit ends up on your calendar too.
6. Duplicate A subtask/specific Habit and remap due dates for next month’s tracking.
Now, when we take this workout habit into the next month, all you have to do is duplicate the previous one.
For example, the end date you choose March 31, Now what happens is, if you have the Click Apps turned on, there is a Click Apps called Remap Sub Task Due Dates, you need to turn that on to have this feature.
What happens is ClickUp will change the sub tasks due dates accordingly!
And this is why I said to set it up for 31 days, so that these days in the end match with your numbers in your workout. Your automated progress bar will also work automatically when you do this.
TL;DR: Duplicate. Take out the ones you don’t want. And you’re all set for another month of good habits!
I love this idea but I have like 20 habits to track and having to set up trackers for each habit would be a major undertaking. Is there a way to duplicate the tracker and then batch rename tasks? Thanks.
There is no “mass-renaming”.
However, if you just number your subtasks and show location (which will tell you what habit it is) you could duplicate the main task and just rename the main task.