151 days. Holy guacamole, people. And I haven’t eaten guacamole today. So tonight, I wanted to talk about tracking your progress, in progress, progress, however you want to say it, in your goals or your habits. Now, a lot of people are like, “Nah, what do I want to do that for? Why do I have to write everything down? Oh, it just takes so much time to do all that. Can’t be bothered.” Excuses, excuses, excuses. It works, people. It really works.
So, I first got given a habit tracker, oh, I’m going to hazard to guess probably close to 20 years ago, from my sister, Sierra Jackson, gave me this little notebook, and it had all these different sections, I think I’ve still got it, with habits. And then you kind of wrote down the habit you were doing, and it had all these different methodologies within the same notebook, as to how to track what you were doing. And over the years, I’ve used lots and lots of different methods to do things. I’ve used old-fashioned paper. I’ve used online things. At the moment, I’m really into having checklists and sheets stuck on walls around me. I’m on a mission at the moment to contact 100 people about a couple of things. So, tick them off. Every person, tick off. I’m on a mission to speak on 2,600 stages. Tick, tick, tick, as I do it. Weight goals, how much water you drink, and would you agree with me that Apple was a pretty smart company? Okay? They’re a pretty smart company.
So, what happens on our phones? I can’t show you our phone because I’m using it right now. It tracks everything, from screen time to your period, to how many steps you’ve taken, to if you’ve got an Apple Watch, your heart rate, your everything is trackable. Everything is data. And all that data does is give you a better knowledge and a better understanding of who you are and what you’re doing. And you can see where you possibly go wrong and things. You can see where you go right on things, which is fantastic to be able to see. You really can. You can look at it and go, “Okay, I got my 10,000 steps, my eight cups of water, and blah, blah, blah, so easily today.” Why was it? And then you might go, “Hm, okay, didn’t get it on this stage” and go, “What is the difference?” The difference might’ve been, well, you ate the night before. May have just put you in a different kind of physical space the next day, did not actually achieve what you want to achieve.
So, I’m not going to dictate to you how you track. I’m not, but I am going to say track, track, track, track. And if you’re new to tracking, just pick a couple of things, maybe even pick one thing, just to start the tracking method. And you may play around with a few different methods. As I’ve said, at the moment, I love the ones where I stick something up on the wall, I go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Diaries these days have little things on the bottom for, “Have you had this amount of water? Have you had this much water? Have you had this much water?” Your exercise. So, find a method, have a Google. When in doubt, have a Google. What would we do before that?
And you’ll know, as you’re tracking, and this is really particularly important with goal setting, and I talk about it in my book, Go for Gold. Can’t even say it. Have difficulty talking today. Go for Gold, which is currently being edited. Yay, it’ll finally get out. Is that tracking is… I can’t remember what tip number is it. Tip number 31, tip number 31, there you go. Is that you get to see where you’re up to and therefore, you can create the milestones and get to tick off the milestones and see how far you’ve got to go. And you can have a little celebration for where you’re at. Because celebrating how you’re going on things is really, really, really important. I’ve got a thing on my wall at home at the moment, where I tick off every day of these 365 days. I have the date and the number of lives it is. And I cross them off, I cross them off. And it’s seeing that get ticked down is so exciting.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I’ll get to the end of 365 days and go, “Well, I think that was fabulous. I’ll do it again.” I might go to like, how some people do, like a live at 8:00 AM every morning, Monday to Friday, something like that, who knows? Oh, my God, it’s 214 days away. Wow. But I will get there. And I’m tracking my progress to get there, which is so exciting. So, you could have all the plans in the world, you could have this detailed plan of what you’re going to achieve, how you’re going to get there, and you don’t do it if you don’t track it. You really don’t. Even…
Have you watched MasterChef? Okay, here we go. Good story with this. So, if you’re watching MasterChef, when they’ve got a really, really complicated recipe, which some of them are, now, remember like the egg, snow egg and stuff like that? And there’s like a thousand different steps, slight exaggeration. They track what they’re doing. They do little lines, and they get to bits, and they tick off what they’re doing. That’s another form of tracking. And you can use it in any industry. You can use it in any aspect of your life. You can use it in your kids’ lives. I encourage you to help your children learn how to track properly, whether it’s homework or steps or what they’re doing with their friends, anything like that. Track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track. If you don’t want Big Brother to know what you’re doing, don’t have a fancy electronic phone or gizmo or anything like that because everything is getting tracked.
And if you’re not doing it already, look at your screen time. That’s fascinating. That tracks all our usage. And I know when I started getting those screen time alerts, I was like, “Ooh, calm down on the social media stuff, Samantha Mary.” So, that’s an important one to look at. So, there go, guys, track. That’s my only mission for you tonight is pick something next week and track it and see how you’re going. You’d actually be surprised, majority of us aren’t drinking enough water. So, that’s a really good one to start tracking. How much water are you drinking every day? Until tomorrow night, have a good night.