Many people track habits on a habit tracker. Few, if any, track their failures and successes. Tracking habits not only improves your ability to continue your habit but also acts as motivation and a way to detect patterns in your behavior. If you always skip working out on Tuesdays, there’s a reason. But if you don’t track your habits, seeing that you skip Tuesdays may be problematic.

Likewise, tracking your failures, and I don’t mean mistakes, can be a way to detect recurring issues and strengths. You can either use a simple check-off tracker and organize it by task and day, or better still, on one line write what failed, why, and how to fix the failure in the future. Track each success with what worked and why. Mark each success green and each failure red.

Over time, you’ll discover patterns of failure that you can then fix or avoid. You’ll also find patterns of success you can then leverage. Oh, and just because you’ve failed at something doesn’t make you a failure. You are not the thing.