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cadadrI did a little thing in Loop Habits and I put some thought into it so maybe it’s helpful to someone else, so I’m blogging about it.
First, what is Loop Habits? quoting from its homepage,
Loop is a mobile app that helps you create and maintain good habits, allowing you to achieve your long-term goals. Detailed graphs and statistics show you how your habits improved over time.
So, it’s an habit tracker, basically. It’s a nice one that I can recommend. Basically, you have habits, and you can check a checkbox indicating you did the thing on a given day. You can assign a note to a habit, and a question. You can have the app notify you, asking you the question you set. Besides merely a binary «I did this today» or not checkmark, you can also have it track amounts, for which you can set goals. For example, I use it to track my walks, I set a goal of 15 minutes or more per day, and I can dial in how many minutes I walked (which is usually in the ballpark of an hour, because I listen to podcasts as I walk).
The problem I wanted to fix was to reinstate some sort of morning routine, which I have mostly lost due to the pandemic and the way I am having to work on my thesis, in this limbo in my life when I can’t be employed. Due to ADHD and sleep drifting around, I have come to lose all my routines, which then affects mental health negatively, as well. I wanted to have something that is ADHD friendly and something that doesn’t assume that my sleep schedule will be fixed somehow, magically.
I have been thinking of making a mobile app or using some Android automation apps to help with this, but it’s no easy task and it takes a lot of time. Finally, I think I figured out a way to do this with a nice tool I already had, tho: Loop Habits, which I already use every day.
So, what I did. Made a habit in Loop that is titled starting the day, and it’s question is my morning routine summarised visually with emoji: «🙌🚾🪥 / 🍳☕📔 / 🚿🧖 ?»
The name is important because it doesn’t assume it’s morning, it’s merely the “starting the day”, the period right after I wake up. Whether it’s 6am, midday, 6pm, or midnight; none of which is unlikely these days.
The series of emoji is helpful because it serves visual memory. To me it’s meant to communicate: “get up, stretch at least elementarily, go to the loo, brush teeth; make some sort of breakfast, even a slice of break, and coffee, and look at the bujo; consider taking a shower”
You may notice a pattern to the way emoji are grouped, and you’d be spot on. It’s something that happened unintentionally but turned out to be helpful: the groupings are such that that a reminder is entangled with a need: my body will tell me to go to the loo, but seldom to stretch or to brush teeth. It will feel hungry in the morning, but not automatically want my morning coffee or the bullet journal (yes, I never experience caffeine withdrawal, so I’ll sometimes forget my morning coffee, which is actually integral to me starting out my day). And those two groups are entangled with showering, which I tend to forget a lot when a lot of my days are spent home, which does happen often when I’m unemployed and my sleep is drifting around the clock, throughout the weeks. Which, not ideal of course, but it is an issue of it’s own, and one that I will not be able to solve by avoiding trying to fix other problems in my life until that is resolved.
Using emoji is helpful because having separate habits like brush teeth or shower feels self-infantilising, at least for me. I feel embarrassed about it even tho nobody will ever see it but me. It feels bad, which means it will harm my mental health, even if it helped some with habit building. But a silly little emoji summary of the morning routine I wanna build is merely that, a summary. It’s not chiding me or reminding me that i’m shit at these things these days.
I combine this with two other things: (1) not planning my day based on the clock and calendar but around when I wake up. If I woke up 6pm Monday, I’ll treat it like Monday until it’s say 7am Tuesday. I’ll check the checkboxes for Monday’s habits and I’ll use the Monday agenda in the bujo. Because it makes sense and otherwise all days are of varied lengths and I can’t really create a consistent sense of achievement for myself, which always leads to bad mood, thus worse mental health, and reduced fruitivity.
And (2) not being strict with this new habit. Even if I did not do all the things in the emoji summary, if I did some of them, I’ll allow me to check the habit for that day. For instance, I didn’t shower yet for today, as I write this—and I don’t know if i will later today, because it is a winter day that I’ll spend in and around home and I did take one yesterday—but i did the rest so i checked the habit out for today, marked it as done.
It may feel like cheating and it might well be it, but it’s not important, because, for whom am I doing this? Definitely not to please some invisible morning routine spirits, but merely to help myself improve my life. Any improvement is better than none, and incrementality is always a good idea, rather than shooting for the stars and ending up at the bottom of the ocean.
Habits will only form after positive feedback loops. If I’m not creating any sense of achievement, all I’ll ever get out of the effort is bad mental health, self-pity, self-hate. I have a long sad list of ending up there every time I tried to build habits by being strict on myself, forgetting that this is all for and between me and myself, so there’s no point in being unnecessarily strict. Thus, instead, with this habit and other recent attempts, I let cheating be, I fabricate a sense of achievement where none would exist.
Because that accumulates and leads to incremental improvement, and sticking to the habit better. Maybe it is not something that neurotypical people don’t need, but I find that it is something I really need and something that really works for me.
Another philosophical note here, but I don’t merely do the above laxness as a starting-out thing. Sometimes I stick to an habit for a while and it does become second nature, but sometimes I begin to lose it and then I find it better to not beat myself over it but merely to allow myself be lax with it and get away with less earned (for the lack of a better word) doses of sense of achievement and the resulting small dopamine spike. Because it helps get back up to speed with it, and why not try achieve that instead of being mad at myself and ending up failing even worse at it all.
Back to the habit itself now.
I cannot really use notification based reminders with any of my habits because they assume you have a somewhat regular sleep cycle. So, in my experience, reminder notifications for habits pile up, after popping up usually in times I can’t do them, at least straight away, and I forget about them. I have recently come up with a solution to this tho, thankfully: not having too many habits in Loop, and using widgets.
Having too many habits is overwhelming, so I only use Loop to keep on top of four major key habits around which I can structure other things: today’s bujo, which helps me keep on top of my bullet journalling, short walk, which helps me go on walks by giving myself the very small and achievable goal of walking outside for 15 minutes (but once I get up and go outside, I end up walking for much longer, often 60-90 minutes, which wouldn’t happen if the goal was 1 hour instead), begin work which helps me start a work session by being a trivially achievable goal that then usually snowballs into a workday by itself, and now the habit called starting the day, which tries to help me create and maintain a routine with which to start the day out cleaner and in a better mood.
As for widgets, I use them as a replacement for notifications for reminders, that do not need to fire on a given time of day. On my phone’s home screen, the top row is dedicated to a row of checkmark widgets that Loop Habits provides. These widgets display the state of the habit for the current day, and they also contain the title. When you tap them, the habit is marked as done. They are always in the home screen of my phone, which I almost always unlock as I wake up, and of course many times throughout the day, and as I see these buttons, I am reminded of the tasks/habits they entail.
This is another place where having an emoji summary instead of a laundry list of what to do in my morning routine helps: because I can’t rely on notifications, which show you your habit question which you can use to remind yourself of what to do as part of that habit, I would have to consult some morning routine to-do list to remember things. But instead, with the emoji summary, I have the whole string of emoji in my visual memory, so I don’t need to look at anything. It is surprising that this works and frankly at this stage I don’t know if it will keep working, so I have a plan in case it ends up not working: making the emoji string the title of the habit itself. I don’t do it right now because it looks a bit ugly and hard to parse, and for some reason the toothbrush emoji shows up as an empty box on the widget, for which I will make a bug report. For now, I do use a notification for starting the day only, just so that the emoji string is in my notification list on the phone, just in case I forget. But I haven’t needed it so far.
As shown in the screenshot, I make the widget for starting the day habit bigger than others, giving it emphasis. Because, usually, being able to check it out means I am likelier to also do the other stuff that day. I also organise them right to left, because I am right handed and that puts this habit’s widget right under my thumb to start the day out with. Using whatever cues to direct me towards it, basically.
And so that’s it, that’s the experiment, and it’s working for me for the last couple of days. Hopefully this helps someone else too, if not as is, as food for thought when you come up with your own system.
Lastly, if you skipped the cut about non-strictness, I do suggest you give it a read. Maybe this whole starting the day shenanigans is useless to you, but I bet you might find that bit interesting regardless of what your planning and habit building needs are.
