ChatGPT For Habit Tracking

Let's look at how we can use ChatGPT and AI tools to optimize your habits and help you to stick to your habits longer because habits compound overtime and can help you change your life in no time at all.

If you've read James Clear's Atomic Habits, you'll know that actually changing your behavior can be really, really difficult.

One of the big mistakes that most people make is that they think: "I need to go to the gym because at the moment I'm not fit".

They're thinking that in the present world, they're not good enough and then that makes effort gain to the gym.

Whereas what they should be thinking is that: "I'm a healthy person, I enjoy going to the gym, and by getting to the gym regularly, I'm gonna make myself feel even better". So it's a deep level personality change.

Now, one of the difficult things here is that unless you work with a coach, it's difficult to gain that level of perspective.

ChatGPT As A Habit Change Coach

So my first way to use ChatGPT to optimize your habits is to use it as a behavior change coach for whatever habit it is you want to stick to.

We can build out a prompt that gives ChatGPT, the persona of a habit building expert like James Clear, and then get them to speak to us in the actual chat so that we can work out why we want to change things and what's in it for us.

This real mindset change as you communicate with the chatbot will help you to think about why you want to change things, and also move you away from making habits feel like a chore and making it a long-term behavior change.

So you're not doing something like a crash diet, which is gonna be difficult to stick to because it's a horrible thing to have to do over a short period of time, and then you go back to your bad habits to something that's much more a consistent ongoing lifestyle change where you adopt things like eating healthier because you know that's good for you and most importantly, you enjoy doing it.

And this level of one-to-one coaching gives you real personalization without having to spend upwards of $5,000 a month on coaches like you can with some high level executive coaching customers.

Example Prompt:

ChatGPT As A Daily Planner

Now, method number two for using ChatGPT to help you stick to all of your habits and get ahead of people is to go right back to the planning stage. Again, referencing James Clear's Atomic Habits, we know that to help you stick to your habits, we need to make them easy and accessible and not take any effort at all. For example, James Clear in his book says that if you go to the gym, if that gym is nearby, it's got all the equipment and you can just literally walk out of your door and get there, you are much more likely to do it than if you have to get all your gym kit together, go and drive four miles down the road and then get into the gym. That's gonna be much more frustrating for you and it's gonna put you off. And one of the ways to make things easy is to build this into a natural routine that comes to you every single day.

And so when you wake up, it feels easy hopping out of bed and strolling around to the gym and getting that done. The problem here is all to do with time management and scheduling and building out those routines.

Often we just don't have the time to look at our time tables, sit back and think, okay, I'm gonna make going to the gym a priority at this time every single day around all my other chaotic assignments.

And so what we can do here is we can jump into ChatGPT and get it to act like a routine planner and get it to map out a timetable for us for the next week or the next month or however long you want to really optimize your habit formation for. So what we're doing here is we're giving ChatGPT another persona, and then we're instructing it with the key habits that we want to do every single day regularly for the next four weeks.

Example Prompt:

Now, the really cool thing is here as we go through and look at this, we can actually track some of our habits and see if we are actually sticking to this timetable. And if we're not, we can go back to our ChatGPT Behavior Change Coach and feed that in and explain to the coach, "Hey, I missed a session or I didn't stick to this habit. Can you give me some tips?"

ChatGPT As A Habit Tracker

And my third and final way to use ChatGPT to help you master your habits and get ahead over the next six months is to use ChatGPT as a habit tracker. If you've seen my video on Free Habit Trackers, you'll know that one of the best ways to actually build a continuous consistent habit is to reward yourself and to track your habits daily, weekly, and monthly and see how you're doing. Again, referencing James Clear, you never want to miss two days in a row of anything. If you miss one day, that's probably okay because you can get back on it. But if you miss two days, all the research says that you are more likely to not go on that third day and to then fall off the wagon and no longer be consistent with your habits. So tracking your habits is really important.

The problem is that habit trackers can be quite hit or miss. There are lots that are locked behind paid rules and some features are only applicable to certain apps or to certain habits you want to track. But ChatGPT can help you out here too. And this is where some of ChatGPT's new features like plugins can be really helpful. So we can actually create our own bespoke plugin using ChatGPT. And don't worry, you don't actually need any technical skills to do that because ChatGPT is gonna do it all for you, which is just super insane and really, really cool.

So with the new plug-ins API that open now I've just released, you can actually make your own plug-ins for ChatGPT. And what we can do here is we can actually use ChatGPT as a code builder.

All plug-ins are created in manifest files, which use a little bit of HTML and CSS code. And what we can do is we can create that in ChatGPT.

Now we can copy and paste that and then put it into something like Sublime Editor and make more edits if we've got some coding skills or if you're happy with it, you can just run it on a local environment using the plugin creation area of ChatGPT, and then we can test that out and see if it works. Now we can actually then release that as a full plugin that we ourselves can use, and you can access that just by going to the top of the prompt window and clicking on plugins and then selecting our plugin that we've created. Now, when you activate that, it will then start the habit tracker and allow you to input your habits and say whether you've done them or not for that specific day, and turn ChatGPT into this full 360 habit tool that's gonna help you stick to your goals and change your life over the next six months to get ahead of people.