[#50] How I Use Habit Tracking to Reflect at the End of Each Month

Welcome to September, autumn is soon among us!

I’ve lived most of my life in the Northeast, and fall is actually my favorite season. It signifies new beginnings for me: school starting. The NFL season kicks off, even though I don’t watch nearly as many games as I used to. There is a kind of built-in deadline at the end of the year because of the holidays.

For both my personal and professional life, I chunk my year into 4-month trimesters instead of typical 3-month quarters. Three months, I always feel like I’m rushing on things.

Weeks ago I shared my habit tracker journal and got a lot of responses. Since we’re at the end of the month, I figured I’d show you what I do to reflect. I’m terrible at remembering wins, so this is how I do it.

The tracker stays on one page and I jot down highlights and a recap on the opposite page.

(Pic here)

I look at my work calendar to see what I did professionally and go into my camera roll and look at the photos throughout the month to remind me of my personal life.

Looking at the calendar tells me exactly what I did for work. Looking at the camera roll gives me a perspective on my life.

I just free write bullet points, here are a few examples:

• Three dinners with my cousins, who I don’t see more than once a year. My cousin Frank was in town for work, so we went out twice and one night went to the famous Eleven Madison Park restaurant. My other cousin Ann had a flight canceled at JFK, so she crashed at my place and we got to hangout.
• Went to a local park twice with my dog, just to read outside.
• Went to a Saturday rooftop barbecue in New York City at my friend DK Kim’s apartment.
• Went to the Jersey Shore for two days to meet my sister and my two nephews.
• Went to Virginia to celebrate birthdays for my sister and my two nephews a few weeks later. They all have birthdays in August, so we batch the celebration.
• My friend of nearly 30 years, Josh Finley, was in New Jersey to preach at a church, so we got to catch up for the first time in a year and have a nice dinner.
• Webinar for a side business, 600 registered and a considerable amount of sign-ups.
• Posted nine times on Instagram. I’ve always had somewhat of an adverse relationship. Outside of running ads, social has never been a huge channel for business. These days I’m just taking clips of B-roll and splicing it together with text. I’m having a lot of fun just being myself again.
• VIP day with a client in Washington, D.C., which I was able to move to D.C. the same week I went to Virginia. I was really grateful that all these years have earned the ability, the flexibility, and the trust with my market to be able to engineer my work around my life. Those who can also do this… don’t take it for granted.
• Big client wins. Started consistent content marketing for a client to revive his dead email list of three years. One of the emails I wrote got him published in a publication that’s really big in his industry. Another client of mine shipped an eBook I wrote for them and made sales – their first time selling a digital product.
• Wrote all newsletters for both of my businesses this month.
• I also note the books I’m reading. I read nonfiction books a few at a time and fiction one at a time. This month I’m digging into Mental Models Volume 2 by Shane Parrish, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, and Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.
• I’ve been listening to Worthy by Jamie Kern Lima. It’s a “spoken rather than written” book but I actually like to digest these occasionally and usually do audio. It def seems more geared to ladies but I also think it’s important for men and women to have well-rounded, well-read perspectives, and to understand communication styles, especially through the medium of books.
• I was also honored to endorse Ryan Levesque’s upcoming book, Return to Real, which is, in my opinion, a bona fide masterpiece. I hope that book goes on to become a defining title for this era.

I’m a big believer that when you have an inkling to buy a book, you should just buy it. If you get even just one takeaway, it’s probably worth the ten or fifteen dollars you spent.

I also track my other habits and jot down the number of days that I did or didn’t do them: diet, Artist Dates, workouts per week number, etc. Then on the bottom half of the page, I just jot down some freehand thoughts.

This is just what works for me. Either way, consider tracking something, anything, just to see what’s going on in that part of your life.

I’ll be back next week to continue last week’s little series I’ve been doing on mastermind groups, which is on my mind because later this month I’ll be in Dallas with my group in person. More on that next week.

Onward and upward,

Mike Kim