The day is off to a brilliant start as I continually get more organized around habits, goals, time (logging & scheduling) and learning. These are the kind of life hacks that I continually share here as well as I’ll be sharing some tools and templates that I use to make organizing and optimizing your life easier.

Here’s a sample of how I’m using google sheets to track habits:

Today I’m sharing an updated version of my approach to Chipits using Google sheets. If you travel regularly or just want to use a screen to track and manage your data a little better.. this google sheet template might be perfect for you.

What I’ve done is essentially create a ‘chip’ for every habit. And conditional formatting when I enter a number for the chips (so that status color turns green). My goal is to complete as many chipits during an alotted time as possible.. working from highest to low priority.

This approach is also mirriong the offline system of chips that I use so I can either use the offline physical verison of chips to track and then later update this sheet, or just update it here directly.

I have included a sample screen shot so you can see some of the chipits I find it important and how I’ve set mine up.

What I’ll do next is feed this information about how many chips I complete in a day into a separate sheet that shows how many chips I’m completing per day, across a week or month .. so basically I get a simple bar graph showing Chips per day across month or week view.

The reason why I choose to set this up myself rather than using an existing habit tracker is simple: more control of what I see and how I see it.

Plus I’m using Google sheets for other things like tracking financial balances, time logging, scheduling etc. so having everything in one place is helpful to me.

Ultimately my goal is to create a single dashboard that reveals the life game I’m playing. It will show the Chips I complete in a day, the deep conscious breaths I take, the amount of water I drink, my financial metrics, etc. And I’m also automating other data that will flow into this ‘mother dashboard’ so I can get a very clear picture of what’s happening in life as automated as possible in all the ways that it can be quantified.

So even though there are some fancier tools out there, having all this data centralized and then displayed the way I want is why I’m hacking google sheets to quantify a lot of the things I find important.

I will share more about how my own personal system works, but in today’s post I wanted to share some of the possibilities for your own system and that it’s worth tinkering with sheets to discover for yourself what things you want to track and how you want to display that information.

The benefit to all of this is that your focus is going where you want to go — and where focus goes, energy flows.

By making the key things you want to focus on, part of a game — and eventually a mother dashboard that you were able to customize the way you want.. you’ll begin to feel a greater sense of control and interconnectedness across everything you do.