UrbanUpdate

I’ve never been that great at self-motivation. Every time I return home from a vacation, I think about how nice it’d be to start anew, to be the sort of person who establishes healthy habits and keeps them like little pets. I make lists of wistful and nebulous New Year’s resolutions, jotted down in the Notes app never to be edited again. It’s a comforting story I like to tell myself every year when the clock strikes twelve and I dream of alternate realities in which I’m just a little better at everything.

Before this year, there’s just one resolution I successfully stuck to: reading 20 books in 2018. This small success can be attributed almost exclusively to a spreadsheet I maintained throughout the year, adding a line item each time I finished a book. And while I made a similarly numerical resolution to exercise twice a week—Just twice a week! How hard could it be!—that project fell off almost immediately. The problem, in retrospect, was that even though I attached concrete numbers to my S.M.A.R.T. exercise goals, I never created a place to tally them. They became far too easy to forget.

This January, high on the thrill of achieving one single goal, I tried something different: On top of adding a 2019 tab to my books spreadsheet, I transformed the wall calendar in my kitchen from something I forget to change once a month into something I add notes to every day. This little paper thing, adorned with cool photos of my friend in front of cars, has become one of the more influential figures in my life.

Although spreadsheets are nice, they’re best—at least for me—to keep track of things I’m already used to doing. In another tab, for example, I keep all the good recipes I’ve made that year. Sometimes I experience lulls in reading and cooking, but I’ve never struggled with getting back on those wagons. To get me to do something as foreign as putting on a pair of spandex pants and jumping up and down, I needed a tracking device that was quite literally in my face.

My calendar keeps track of two things: morning pages (it’s a writing thing—three pages longhand every morning, and I hear my nemesis Rivers Cuomo does it too) and my workout routine. Any time I exercise for fifteen minutes or more, I note it in the calendar, and keep a little tally of my workouts in the corner. My goal is to workout 111 times in 2019, and I’m still on track.

I lagged a bit after returning from a vacation, and again after a long stretch of busy weeks. But after one too many days of enduring the blank calendar looking at me scornfully, I finally laced up my running shoes for a huffy jog around my neighborhood. This was not an app I could delete or stuff into a folder, or a too-upbeat push notification I could turn off when I got tired of it telling me to “just get back out there!” (I’m looking at you, running apps). When I go too long without writing or sweating, the empty squares pile up. I see them when I make my coffee in the morning (something I can’t avoid) or do the dishes (something I try to avoid). The only thing more effective would be a live-in personal trainer, or a new brain with tighter-tuned motivation neurons, neither of which I can afford.

I even record my workouts twice: In detail on they day they happen, and in the corner of the calendar, where I keep a running tally of where I’m at for the month. Somehow, this has an outsize effect, like giving a child both a lollipop and a toy after they clean their room.

I’ve started fantasizing about all the things I could add to my life if I only incorporated them into my calendar routine. Reading daily politics articles beginning to end! Getting to inbox zero! Going on dates?? The possibilities are endless. And it turns out there’s science to back this up. “Research shows that our brain processes information differently when we write it down with pen and paper,” explains St. Louis-based psychologist Barbara Markway, Ph.D. “The very act of writing makes us remember better, and this keeps us on track. Writing involves making more of a commitment to our goals. When we use a phone app, we expect the app to remind us—we’re turning responsibility over.”

Going analog everything—typing on a typewriter, or installing a landline—can feel embarrassingly twee, but in this case, it creates the quiet space I aspire to build more of in my brain. Tallying a workout doesn’t immediately lead to checking Instagram; this gives me a tiny but important sense of control. I get excited to walk over to the wall and tally my tasks every day, if only to start my day off on a competent foot before finding myself on the couch eating mochi ice cream bites at 3 P.M. And it helps to mark the passage of time in a way that isn’t depressing: every month a new photo, every day a new opportunity to accomplish something tiny.