In 2023 I started something brand new (to me): I tracked 2 things daily, my habits and my mood, for an entire year.
the year-long experiment.
This journey began, with true definition, three years ago. In 2024, I’ve seen the fruits of my labor come to bear.
What I’d hoped to achieve:
In simplest terms, I hoped to achieve consistency as a means of reducing daily stress and increasing my overall mood.
Mostly, I really wanted to unlock some progress on goals I’d set my sights on long ago. Things like feeling healthy and capable in my day-to-day life, finding a greater sense of stability, and building sustainable routines to keep it up for the long haul.
I aspired to be someone who got enough sleep, who read, and who journaled. Maybe, I could even be someone who wrote a book or learned a new language in their free time. (But first, what is “free time”?)
Productivity content wasn’t new to me. Nor were goal setting, project management, or progress reporting. I was well-versed in self-efficacy and a wide array of other therapeutic modalities. “What gets measured gets improved” so they say. There’s admittedly a lot more nuance involved with that one, though…
Tracking metrics? Well, duh. That’s my professional bread and butter. I even have a long-standing relationship with tracking performance athletically, too.
…why had I never thought to track how often I went to bed as early as I said I would? Or whether I’d journaled like I’d planned to?
What I measured:
I tracked my habits throughout the year for all of 2023.
- I measured my daily completion of the same list of 12 habits.
- I measured my mood throughout the day, every day.
How I scored myself:
- Accountability: Did I complete this task?
- The criteria was simply a "yes" or "no" where, for example, completing 9 out of 10 tasks on the list would earn a score of 90% for the day.
- Mood: How am I feeling on a scale of 1 - 10 right now?
- I recorded a score three times per day, out of 10, morning, noon, and night, where a value of one would be crippling despair and 10 would be complete euphoria.
the results.
In 2023:
- I averaged a 78% accountability rating for my daily habits in 2023.
- I averaged a daily mood of 7.5 out of 10 in 2023.
I learned:
- My accountability score averaged a month-over-month net-increase of 5.5%.
- My mood score averaged a month-over-month net-increase of 9.5%.
Conclusion:
- Focusing on daily accountability increased my mood by 10% throughout the year of 2023.
Key Takeaway:
- Accountability has a 2:1 impact on mood, proving that mood follows action. Doing the thing impacts how you feel about it. Not the other way around.
Waiting for motivation is likely to result in not completing a task and therefor not achieving an increase in mood.
Nuerobiologically, action creates a feeling of motivation that leads to more action. If nothing else, accountability leads to task completion, and achievement results in stress reduction.
For me, at least, less stress creates space for a better mood to exist.
If we can agree that a good mood corresponds with happiness, focusing on accountability in 2023 made me 10% happier.
So... I've kept going.
So far in 2024:
- I've averaged an 88% accountability rating for my daily habits.
- I've averaged a daily mood of 8.2 out of 10.
It turns out, I'm someone who gets enough sleep, who reads, and who journals. I just might be someone who's writing a book or who's learning a new language in their free time, too.
