Discipline Tracker: Points for the Hard Things
List the habits that take discipline, give each one points by how hard it is for you, and tick them off day by day. You get a daily score, a weekly score and a discipline percentage to beat next week. Print the week as a sheet or keep it on screen. Free, no sign-up, saved in your browser.
Points: easy 1, medium 4, hard 8, very hard 16. Up to 10 habits. Tap a box to tick it.
What a discipline tracker is
A habit tracker asks "did I do it?". A discipline tracker asks "did I do the hard things, the ones I didn't feel like doing?". The difference is the points. Making your bed and a 6 am run both get a tick on a normal tracker, but they don't take the same effort. Weight them, and your score shows the days you pushed through, not just the days you were busy with easy wins.
How to score your habits
| Points | Use it for | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (easy) | Takes a minute, you rarely skip it | Make the bed, drink water first thing, take vitamins |
| 4 (medium) | Takes a little effort or 10 to 20 minutes | Read 10 pages, no phone at meals, 15-minute tidy |
| 8 (hard) | You often talk yourself out of it | Workout, deep work before email, no sugar |
| 16 (very hard) | The one that changes things, and the one you avoid | 5 am wake-up, an hour on the side project, no social media all day |
Score by how hard it is for you, not in general. If a habit gets easy after a few weeks, lower its points and add something harder: that's what progress looks like on this sheet.
Your discipline score
Your weekly score is the points you earned out of the points possible. Don't aim for 100%: a week at 100% usually means the list is too easy. Somewhere between 70% and 85% is a list that stretches you and is still doable. Compare against your own last week, not against anyone else.
Three rules keep it honest: start with three to five habits, not ten; tick a box only when the whole habit is done; and on a bad day, do the easiest hard thing on the list rather than nothing. If you want a day-by-day count for one habit, the streak tracker shows how many days in a row you've kept it.
Spend the points
Points work better when they buy something. Decide in advance what a good week gets you: say, a meal out for 80% or more, a new book for a third good week in a row. There are 70 ideas in ways to reward yourself.
That's how Habit Rewards works on your phone. Each habit pays coins by difficulty (1, 4, 8 or 16), on the days you pick or a set number of times a week, and you spend the coins on rewards you price yourself. It's free on iPhone and Android for up to 3 habits. Prefer a spreadsheet? The habit tracker spreadsheet does coins and rewards in Excel or Google Sheets.
