My tracker for 'water intake' took 3 months to actually get right

I kept trying to make this super detailed water tracker with cute little bottle icons and it was a total mess. Every week I'd redesign it because I couldn't find a layout that I would actually fill in at the end of the day. Finally landed on just a simple checkmark box next to each hour (not the bottles) and it's been working for two straight weeks now. Anyone else waste a crazy amount of time overcomplicating a super basic tracker?

2 comments

2 Comments

henderson.kim14d ago

Heard a story from my friend Michelle who spent two months building this color-coded mood tracker with emojis and weather icons... she never used it once. Then her roommate just wrote "good day" or "bad day" on a sticky note and has a whole year's worth of data. Michelle finally gave up and now just texts herself a thumbs up or thumbs down at bedtime, says it's the only system that's actually stuck. Sometimes we just need the dumbest possible version to make it work I guess.

dylanward14d ago

Had a buddy who tried doing this whole gratitude journal thing with like 5 prompts every night. Lasted 3 days. Then he just started writing down one good thing that happened that day on a napkin or receipt and throwing it in a shoebox. After six months he had this little pile of random scraps with stuff like "found a parking spot right away" and "that girl smiled at me". He said it was way more honest than trying to come up with deep stuff every night. Sometimes the dumbest system wins because you actually do it.