Gamified habit tracker (with pirates)

A habit tracker is a simple yet powerful tool to help you create lasting behavior change. 

It’s missing one crucial ingredient to make habits stick though: Variable rewards. (Read below why this is important and what’s the science behind it)

So I made a gamified habit tracker with variable, random rewards. 

It also has a pirate telling you quotes from your favorite habit experts James Clear, Nir Eyal, Charles Duhigg and BJ Fogg. 

So have a look and make gambling addiction work in your favor. 

It is a google sheet that only uses built in functions (no appscript). So no access, login, email or anything else is necessary to get started. Simply make a copy of the sheet and start tracking the habits you want to improve on. 

The science, why a variable reward is so important to make a habit stick: 

Hooked Model - Nir Eyal:

1. Trigger
2. Action
3. Variable reward → The variability releases a lot more dopamine that helps grow the neural pathways in the brain, that make the behavior become automatic.
4. Investment

Habit Loop - James Clear: 

According to James Clear, there are four factors that increase the likelihood of a behavior to be performed: 

1. How obvious the trigger for it is
2. How strong the craving for the anticipated reward is
3. How easy it is to do. 
4. How satisfying it is. 

So if you want to increase the likelihood of any behavior, you have to:

1. Make the trigger visible
2. Make it attractive → a variable reward releases much more dopamine, which is responsible for the craving to perform a certain behavior. 
3. Make it easy, by making it small and removing friction 
4. Make it satisfying, for example by making progress visible. (Habit trackers are great for that)

Some tips:

1. Make the habits really small. Like “Do one pushup”, or “Meditate 1 minute”. Remember that the #1 goal is to increase consistency first. Then, you can expand on that. 

2. Define a very specific trigger for each habit. This could be a place and time, or another habit that you already have. For example: “After I brushed my teeth, I will journal one sentence”.

3. Bookmark the habit tracker google sheet. Making it easy is one of the most important steps to growing a new habit. So having it accessible with one click can make the a huge difference. 

3. Have a quick glance at the sheet every morning, to “prime” yourself. This will increase the likelihood of you actually completing the habits for that day.