As someone with ADHD, I know how easy it is to get caught up with all the shiny features and capabilities of aesthetic, complex Notion setups. However, after habit tracking for years (with or without Notion), I've realized a couple of things:
- Once a habit has been established, tracking is no longer necessary.
- Stats mean nothing for the most part. Minus the symptom tracking and food journal that eventually helped me treat "incurable" diseases naturally (since doctors gave up on me), I don't really need statistics on how many days I've done yoga, or what my extended fasting record is in days.
What matters is getting after it, day in and day out. I may go several weeks or months at a time without logging the habits I do, but a rough day might make my dopamine-hungry brain go "I need to check off something", or I may need a reminder of what I need to do and why I'm doing it.
Focus is everything, not just on the task at hand, but on the overall picture as well. Your goals, your reasons for pursuing those goals, and the precious little time we have left on this planet.
So having an aesthetic Notion habit tracker with all the formulas, relations and rollups gamifying the process may have seemed like an ADHDer's dream, but I later realized, I don't really need gamification from my digital apps.
What I do need is the occasional reminder ("what are we doing today again?"), quantification ("you have a minimum daily goal of reading 10 pages from a book, 10 sets of full body calisthenics, and 3 hours worth of study pomodoros. Go!"), and the occasional dopamine-release of ticking a box (whether a digital one or on paper).
What I've done yesterday is no concern of mine unless I ate something stupid that brought up symptoms the next day (thankfully not an issue anymore). Today is a new day, a new beginning, a new opportunity to kick butt.
So with that in mind, my latest humble free offering of a Notion template is a minimal habit tracker. This one's so minimal you can recreate it in seconds. But here's the link to duplicate it to your workspace if you like.
- Your system should be forgiving for not always having the time to log your habits (as long as you're still consistent with them), hence the lack of a database. If you're spending so much time on getting things done that you have no time to track your habits, you're a successful human being in my book.
- Quantification is your guide on the amount of work you need to put in, so I really do suggest you take the time and be more specific with your daily goals.
- Lastly if you find the Pomodoro method as valuable as I do, you can also track the "tomatoes" with the automatic timestamps to ensure you meet those daily targets.
If there's any takeaway from this post, it is this: It's not the system nor the tool that makes you great; it's your adherence and respect to the plans you set out to execute. Discipline doesn't need to look good on paper (or on a cute Notion template); all you gotta do is show up. Your work ethic will take care of the rest.
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