A history with habit trackers

Some issues I’ve had with habit trackers in the past:

Tracking stuff with high expectations and difficult daily goals. Signing up for too much, feeling bad when it didn’t get done.
My phone was too much of a distraction. It took me about two years to really cut my phone down to just a tool and not a part-time entertainment device. There is some advice out there to avoid compulsive phone usage such as “don’t use it in the first or last 3h of the day”. But honestly that’s extremely difficult to enforce and I have never kept it up for more than a day or so. I’d really like to know what proportion of single young people consistently make that work over time. (Single because of the alleviating loneliness through technology use solution. LDR also counts I guess.)

Current productivity setup

First, I have almost no apps on my iPhone home screen. Everything resides in the App Library only. My home screen only has widgets on it. This is important because it reduces the possibility of opening the phone and then forgetting why you did it. I exclusively search for apps by swiping down on my home screen and using the search function.

I use a simplified bullet journal. I have one for work and a separate one for home. The purpose is not for looking back but rather for being a working scratchpad. There is no index, no pagination, no monthly / yearly / weekly spreads. Some days I write 3 pages and most days I write nothing. I use bullets for to-dos like the bullet journal tutorial recommends. I use hyphens for note taking and blank lines for sentence-writing. Each entry has a date and a day of week. I recently bought a weekly planner because the cover was pretty but I don’t yet know if I can make it part of my setup. I’ll try.
habit tracker app. The app itself isn’t on my home screen, but a widget showing what I have / haven’t completed for the day is.
reminder app on iphone. Once again, a home screen widget telling me what is due today.
calendar for time blocking. I use google calendar and like to keep it open on a spare monitor.
obsidian for keeping digital notes, mostly links and images. synced with iCloud.

this has been built up over a while and i absolutely do not think setting it up at once will be sustainable. and it will likely evolve over time still.

On digital technology use

During the “pledge to be drug free” week in 5th grade, my 5th grade teacher talked about how she had trouble dealing with grief after her family member passed away. To cope, she was prescribed what I remember as Valium. She said after a while, she felt herself very drawn to and looking forward to dosage time, and that was when she realized she was on the road to addiction. Then she quit immediately. I think about this anecdote every time I ask questions to myself about my technology usage.

Phone-as-a-tool has more or less been achieved, but what about laptop-as-a-tool? I don’t know if that will ever happen. It’s been a toy for as long as a PC existed. I’ve tried setting up different laptop “users” before, or putting my laptop in different environments depending on usage. But these do not work consistently for various reasons.