My exact daily wins tracker grid. Six life domains, three wins each, the logic for each one, and the cuts I made to get here. Use it as a template or build your own.
The version of this list I am posting today is the eleventh. The first version had 27 wins and lasted four days. The fourth version had nine and lasted eleven days. The version that finally stuck has eighteen wins, split three each across six life domains, and I have run it for nine months without changing the shape.
If you are setting up your own daily wins tracker, the cleanest way to learn the shape is to see a working one. So here it is, win by win, with the logic for each cut. Use it as a template or use it to argue against your own.
The grid
Six domains. Three wins per domain. The domains are physical, mental, learning, social, productivity, creativity. The order does not matter. The constraint does.
Every win passes two tests. Small enough to do on a hard day. Meaningful enough that running it daily for a year would change me. If a win fails either test, it gets cut. The cuts are the part most people skip, which is why their first list dies in week two.
See the daily-wins feature page for the four interaction modes (binary, counter, timer, text). I will note which mode each win uses below.
Physical (3 wins)
1. Move for 20 minutes. Timer win. Anything counts. A walk counts. A workout counts. A 20-minute kitchen-floor stretch counts. The number is deliberately low so that the win is gettable on a travel day. Aim higher in your weekly deep dive, not in your daily floor.
2. Two liters of water. Counter win. Four glasses by lunch, four by dinner. I tried "drink water" as a binary win for a month. It never failed. That is the signal it was not measuring anything. Counter forces honesty.
3. In bed by 11:30pm. Binary win. The single highest-leverage entry on the entire list. Everything else compounds when sleep does. Nothing else compounds when sleep does not.
Mental (3 wins)
4. Morning intent paragraph. Text win. One sentence is fine. Three sentences is plenty. Written before email. The point is to make the day have a thesis before the inbox writes one for me.
5. Ten minutes of stillness. Timer win. Meditation, breathwork, sitting on the balcony without a phone. The format does not matter. The absence of input does.
6. Evening review paragraph. Text win. One paragraph at night, before bed. What did the day produce that the morning version of me did not expect. Where did I cheat the wins. This pairs with the morning intent and is the single best daily writing habit I have.
Learning (3 wins)
7. Read for 30 minutes. Timer win. Books, long-form articles, papers. Not Twitter. Not feed. The timer is the trick. Once it is running, the friction of stopping is higher than the friction of continuing.
8. One note saved to the second brain. Binary win. A single atomic note. The bar is intentionally low. The compounding is the point. After a year, that is 365 notes, which is roughly an entire encyclopedia of things I would otherwise have forgotten.
9. One technical doc page read. Binary win. Specific to my work. If you are not in a technical field, swap for whatever the equivalent is. The principle is that the learning win for your job is different from the learning win for general curiosity. I needed both.
Social (3 wins)
10. One real conversation. Binary win. A real conversation is anything longer than two minutes that is not transactional. Most days this is trivial. On head-down work days, this is the win that catches me.
11. Message one friend I have not spoken to in a month. Binary win. Specific cadence. The "I have not spoken to in a month" qualifier is what makes this a win and not a comfort. It costs me ten seconds. Without the prompt, I never do it.
12. Phone away during meals. Binary win. Negative win, technically. The format is "the thing I did not do." This still counts as a win because the discipline is daily and the payoff is loud.
Productivity (3 wins)
13. Two hours of deep work, uninterrupted. Timer win. Defined as no Slack, no email, no phone, one task. Two hours is the upper bound I can sustain daily. If your day allows four, set four. If your day allows ninety minutes, set ninety. The point is that the number is real.
14. Inbox to zero by end of day. Binary win. Yes, even on the heavy days. Yes, this is controversial. I run a small enough operation that this is achievable. If you do not, replace with "process the top ten." The principle is finishing a process, not just running one.
15. Ship one thing. Binary win. One unit of output. A commit. A doc. A reply that has been pending. The "one thing" definition is loose on purpose. The bar is that the day produced an artifact, not just activity.
Creativity (3 wins)
16. Write for 25 minutes. Timer win. Anything. Not work writing. Personal essay, half-formed thought, voice memo transcribed. The 25 is borrowed from the Pomodoro number because the timer ritual matters more than the duration.
17. One small creative act. Binary win. Sketch, song, photo, a paragraph of fiction. Not the same as the writing win. The point of this one is breadth. The creative domain is the one I most easily neglect, so the win is built to catch a low bar.
18. Consume one piece of art with full attention. Binary win. A song with eyes closed. A short film. A poem read out loud. The attention requirement is the win. Background music does not count, which is the whole point.
How long this takes per day
The check-in itself takes about ninety seconds. Tap, tap, tap.
The wins themselves take whatever they take. On a normal day, the timer wins add up to roughly 95 minutes. The binary wins add up to another 30 to 60 minutes of attention spread through the day. The text wins are another five.
On a heavy work day, I might hit twelve of eighteen. That is fine. The streak is the check-in honesty, not the completion count. See the longer piece on what the streak actually measures in the pillar article.
The wins that did not make it
For honesty, here are wins I tried and cut.
- "Cold shower." Too easy to skip on cold mornings, too punishing in summer. Made the list inconsistent.
- "No alcohol." Belongs to a different system. Wins are about adding, not avoiding. The single "phone away during meals" exception holds because the absence is a daily ritual, not a lifestyle rule.
- "Track calories." Tried for a month. The data was real and the cost was disproportionate. The right place for this is a separate dedicated tool, not the wins grid.
- "Five gratitudes." Felt like homework, never connected to the rest of the system. Evening review covers the same territory in a way that does not feel mandatory.
When to revise the list
Once per quarter, in a weekly deep dive that you give a little extra time to. Look at the streak history per win. If a win has been at 100% for ninety days, it is not a win, it is furniture, and a different win should take the slot. If a win has been below 30% for ninety days, the win is wrong for your life, not you wrong for the win. Either way, cut.
Do not revise weekly. Revising weekly is a way to avoid running the list.
How to build your own grid
Open a piece of paper. Write the six domains. Under each, write five wins. Then cut to three. The cutting is where the system gets made. If you cannot get to three, the system will not survive month one.
Then check yourself for sixty days. Run a weekly deep dive on Sundays. At day sixty, revise once. After that, run the same grid for a year before you decide whether the method works.
FAQ
Why exactly 18 wins, not 12 or 24?
Eighteen is what six life domains times three wins per domain produces. Both numbers are deliberate. Six is the smallest domain count where every life shows up. Three is the smallest win count per domain where pattern-matching works.
Can I have fewer than three wins in a domain I do not care about?
You can, but the question is the wrong one. A domain you do not care about either belongs in someone else's grid, or is a domain you have not been honest with yourself about yet. The structural answer is to keep three wins per domain even if one feels weak. The weak slot will tell you something in the weekly deep dive.
Does Morrow Self come with default wins?
Yes. The 18 above are roughly the defaults, with small phrasing differences. The free tier uses the defaults. Pro lets you write custom wins. See pricing.
What if I cannot do a win every day?
Most people will not hit 18 of 18 on most days. That is not a failure. The streak measures honest check-in, not perfect completion.
Build your own version of this grid in five minutes. Download Morrow Self and use the 18 above as a starting template.