A lot of us are at least decent in establishing good habits and maintaining them when we have a consistent routine to help us trigger these. And then there are those of us who have to pack up the suitcase and get out on the road to make that money! Consistency goes flying out the door, and in comes all of the health detriments associated with travel!
Over the years, I have been able to develop the habits that drive my core values. By being able to create habits tied to core values, it makes it easier to pull on that habit despite the surroundings. It still requires some help by finding some triggers. The strategy that I’ve developed and that works is that I have an online “Habit Tracking” tool that I created, which I attempt to fill in each day.
Each of my chosen tracked habits has a line to enter some notes so that I can look back on specifics when self-evaluating, as well as a score from 0-4. I’ve also weighed the habits so that the score of each will give me a fair overall evaluation of the day of how I did following my playbook. Don’t get me wrong… you can still knock out all of the good habits and have a crappy day. But you infinitely increase your chances for having a great day by following through on the actions that build you up!
Travel is honestly a great opportunity to excel at your habits that you are working on. For example, when I am on a plane for three hours, I can do all of the following in greater lengths than what my crazy, child-filled home life can offer: meditate, read, write uninterrupted, go through affirmations, visualize, catch up on sleep. The plane is such a perfect place because you have the best reason to put everything in airplane mode. The distractions disappear, and you are afforded the ability to be your best self.
We will dive into some more habit specific articles to help you develop and maintain strong habits on the road, so I only wanted to scratch the surface. In addition, I wanted to provide you with a look at the Google Sheets form that I use for my tracking. Google Sheets is nice for me because I have the app and can enter my information on the go. It also allows me to input some backend calculations to help me compute what my ideal overall score may be.
The link to this sheet can be found here. Save it to your own documents (you will only be able to view the one in the link), adjust the habits, and adjust the percentages that you apply to each. This will tailor it to you! This will take a little deep reflection to understand which of the habits have certain amounts of impact on you. Some people may put a higher emphasis on social interactions during a day, and another will put that on whether they journaled for 60 minutes. It’s in your hands now, so have fun!
I’ll quickly run through some of the nuances of the sheet so that you know how to adjust to your liking. I built some of these 1.5 years ago, so I don’t have all the details of why I have used the numbers I did on the backend tabs. Follow along below to see what to focus on.
Welcome page: You can read through what my mission and vision was when I created this for a small group of friends, or quickly move past. Up to you!
Questionnaire: I gave my best attempt to try to help my friends develop a percentage score for each of the 6 main habit categories created. This was done through some questions that ranked certain situations. This is definitely not an exact science (not even close!) but is available to you if you’d like to try it and give some feedback to the scores provided.
At the top of the page, it asks for a self score in column B. This is the percentage that this particular habit contributes to your success in feeling awesome during a day. The red colored habits (6 of them) should add up to 100. If there are sub-habits under the red, these should be considered versus each other and add up to 100.
Then take the quiz and see what scores you received from that. There is an average give as well. Ultimately, you get to choose which numbers you put into the Point System tab to generate your daily scores. If you know yourself really well, and this quiz was completely off, disregard, but do send me the feedback!
Habit Tracker: This is where the action happens! This will be your daily checklist to be filling in. You can choose to leave notes for each habit, or just enter a score. This is based on your evaluation of your performance. Some are more straight forward, as in I did it or didn’t. Some are more subjective, or partially completed. I put a guide to how I would approach them in the next section, the Point System. You winning the day on your diet may be completely different from someone else’s diet win. And that’s OK! The goal is to hold yourself accountable and improve each and every day!
Point System:
This is the place where you will weigh (with or without help from the questionnaire) each habit on how successful it makes you feel each day. Be honest with yourself on this, and make sure these add up to 100%!
Should you have questions on best practices that I use, leave your comments below or shoot me an email at jon@hotelathlete.com. I’m excited for you to start being your best self!
