Accomplish skills, not tasks

Today I wanted to polish my “habigraph” — a checklist of regular weekly and daily tasks. I’ve recently added a few twice a day habits, which as I print out the habigraph for the week I’d manually add a diagonal line in those boxes.

This has worked fine, but took away from the aesthetic a bit and required a bit of manual drawing each Sunday when it’s printed. I’d looked for a split checkbox symbol before with no luck, but today finally decided to have a solution before posting the new graph for this week. Even if it meant needing to draw the split checkboxes myself.

After a few moments browsing special symbol font libraries one last time to no avail, I fired up Pixlr. Attempting to copy and edit the checkbox currently on the sheet produced terrible results. So, I did in fact proceed to draw them from scratch, which I’ve never done before.

I learned how to make shapes, remove the fill and customize the border. I played with Google Sheet’s new “image in cell” option for the first time to get my checkbox right where I wanted it. My new split checkbox looked great, but it didn’t quite match, so made a duplicate of my checkbox pre-dash and replaced the unicode symbol previously utilized across the sheet.

In less than an hour, I acquired all these new little skills and even some new perspectives on design and drawing digitally. As a bonus, my habrigraph looks really good.

When you are approaching tasks, even the most mundane, frame your process in order to improve not just your product but also yourself.