Does Tracking Your Habits Actually Work?

In 1733, Benjamin Franklin started a little book that got a black spot every time he slipped up, and he scraped the spots out so often that the pages wore into holes. Today the habit tracker has its own chapter in Atomic Habits, and a famous rule: don't break the chain. So does keeping score of your habits actually work? We look at three famous scorekeepers (Franklin's red-ruled virtue book, Anthony Trollope's week-by-week page diary, and Ernest Hemingway's word chart under a gazelle head), where "don't break the chain" really came from and what Jerry Seinfeld said about it, a meta-analysis of 138 randomised studies (almost all health programmes), and two newer experiments: one on how counting changes the way an activity feels, and one on what a broken streak does to motivation. Verdict: holds up, modestly. Chapters 0:00 A book full of holes 0:44 Franklin's little book 1:32 Pages full of holes 2:52 The novelist's diary 3:52 The word chart 4:45 Don't break the chain 5:50 What the studies found 6:55 Counting changes the feeling 7:44 The broken chain 8:41 The verdict Sources Harkin et al. 2016, Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis (Psychological Bulletin, open author copy): https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/91437/ Etkin 2016, The Hidden Cost of Personal Quantification (Journal of Consumer Research): https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv095 Silverman & Barasch 2023, On or Off Track: How (Broken) Streaks Affect Consumer Decisions (Journal of Consumer Research, open copy): https://udspace.udel.edu/items/42ce576b-8e... Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Pine edition, 1916), Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20203 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883), Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5978 The Paris Review, Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21 (1958): https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/... Lifehacker, Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret (2007, archived): http://web.archive.org/web/20090218034926/... Jerry Seinfeld's 2014 Reddit AMA reply (archived): http://web.archive.org/web/20190106054406/... James Clear, Atomic Habits endnotes: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits/endnotes Not affiliated with or endorsed by James Clear or his publisher. Illustrations and narration made with AI tools; research and script checked against the sources above. For general education, not medical or professional advice. #habits #selfimprovement #explained