Updated 1 Jan 2022. Originally published 17 Sep 2007.

In my last post, I talked about several “extra pages” that I have in my Day-Timer. One of these forms is the “Habit List.” This Habit List, shown below, came from Productivity501.

This is one of the most brilliant innovations I’ve seen in a planner form in a very long time. Normally, all of the piddly recurring tasks and/or habits you are working to develop get thrown into the mix with all of the other (one-time) tasks you need to accomplish. This not only muddles things up; it takes up a lot of space! The Habit List is a very streamlined way to manage all of these recurring tasks. (I am a bit embarrassed that some of the things you see need to be on my list at the moment. My schedule was completely shot by major events over the summer and I’m working at restoring some semblance of order to my days.)

Now, the form did require some tweaking in order to get it into my Pocket Day-Timer (sorry, Productivity501; I had to cut the title off of my form to make it fit). Here’s how I did it.

The form is available as a PDF. (It requires the free Acrobat Reader to view. Most of you probably already have Acrobat Reader.)  One of the options available from Acrobat Reader’s print menu is “Page Scaling.”  From that drop-down menu, I selected “multiple pages per sheet.”  The first thing I tried was printing two per sheet.  (It’s a bit of trouble initially, because it actually only prints one; it just prints it small enough to get two on a page. This means you will have to feed it back through the printer.)  [Update: The Habit List is now provided only as a part of the Productivity 501 Habit Course.  I think that’s still free, but you can’t download just the form.]

If you do two per sheet, they will fit, but just barely.  (The image on the right above was printed two per sheet.)  I thought that printing four to a page would make them impossibly tiny, but they didn’t print a whole lot smaller than the two-per-sheet ones (see left image above).  Once I had the pages printed smaller, I cut them out and glued them to “extra” pages I didn’t need from my Day-Timer kit (in this case, a vehicle maintenance record, I think).

All that may sound like a lot of work, but a list covers a whole month and it really doesn’t take that long to prepare twelve of these, if you do them all in one “batch.”  Since my Day-Timer booklets each cover two months, I glued two of these back-to-back and inserted the page at the end of the first month.

More Habit Trackers

Fortunately, this idea has caught on, and you can now find habit trackers in a variety of formats from a variety of sources!  You can just do an internet search and you’ll find tons of options, but in case you don’t want to go track one down, I’m linking to just a few options here.

• printable straight habit tracker
• printable round habit tracker
• printable round habit tracker (another style)
• printable fun mini habit trackers
• printable hexagons habit tracker
• rubber stamp for round habit tracker (about 3.5″)
• app Habitify (Android & iOS)
• app Habitica (desktop, Android, & iOS – my teen uses this one)