Everyday Habit Tracker

[Zoraida]

Everydayis hands-down one of the most delightfully simple habit tracker apps out there. All the action happens on its simple visual interface, where you can see your habits stacked vertically on the left, and a timeline that progresses towards the right on top to the current day.

The core concept of the app is to perform habits daily, and to not break the chain or streak. If you perform a habit, you mark it as done. On the right, you see how long your current streak, as well as the previous high score of your streak and a total count of times you performed a habit in its lifetime.

HabitCal is a free online tool for tracking (and more importantly,building) good habits -- like diet and exercise. I came up with itspecifically for my everyday systems habits, but youcould use it for any habit you like.

First, if you haven't already, create an account and log in. You'llthen be redirected to this page except now that we know who you arethere will be a personalized greeting with an edit link at thetop.

On the edit page, you'll see an empty list of "habits." Click on the"add" link next to this list to add a one word (no spaces) name for thebehavior you'd like to track (browse other people's habits here). Then chose the timeframe you want, make sure the habit you want to track is selected (youhave to choose it from the list even if it's the only item there), andhit "show." A calendar will display for each month in the selectedtime frame for each habit. Markgreen=success/yellow=exempt/red=failure (the habittraffic light) every day until you're no longer interested intracking the habit. At the end of a month or a year, you'll have astriking visual picture of how well you complied with your desiredbehavioral goal. You can track several behaviors at the same time, andthe interface makes it easy to set multiple days of input at once. Ifthe full traffic light is too much, just use negativetracking to tick off failures when they happen.

Besides your personal edit view, there is also a public view thatyou can share with friends and random people on the internet (NOTE:nothing here is private -- see disclaimerbelow). Just click "switch to public view" on the top of your editpage to see what this looks like.

This is similar to the calendar view, but more compact. It makes iteasier to view and edit many habits at once. Calendar view getscumbersome if you're dealing with more than say 5 habits atonce. Table view makes it easy to get a handle on 10, 20 or more(note: it may not actually be a good idea to tackle this many habitsat once, so be careful and don't go nuts just because the technologymakes it easy). In edit mode, you can use the "batch input" arrows tocolor in all the blank squares in a row or column.

This gives you a statistical overview of your compliance over theselected period of time, the percentage of which you marked assuccess, exempt, or failure. "Special" (non-weekend or NWS) days arereported in a separate column to give you a quick overview as towhether you're abusing them. There's also a pie chart, a summarycompliance score, and a personal olympics medal (if you deserveone!).

I realize that this isn't a perfect scoring system for all peopleand all habits, and version 3 will let you choose between severalscoring systems for each habit. I already hacked something for"weekendluddite" so that special days aren't penalized there.

TSV stands for tab separated values. This option lets you downloadyour precious data to back it up or view it in excel or something. Andif you're a programmer, you can build your own visualizer for habitcaldata. The format is simple, 3 tab delimited columns: date, habit, andscore (reported as 1/0/-1 for success/exempt/failure,respectively).

Why did I come up with my own habit tracking system instead ofusing one of the (technically) excellent ones already out there?Because none of them work quite the way I want them to. They usecomplicated scoring systems that encourage bad ways of thinking abouthabit. When you are building a habit, you want to focus on asustainable minimum level of compliance: either you do what isrequired, or you don't (or you are exempt that day). Quantifyingsuccess beyond this is counterproductive. Why? Well, first off, it'smore complicated, but more importantly it's bad because you'll startto want to trade points -- to think that heroic efforts yesterday canbuy off the need to do anything today. Or that efforts in one area canbe exchanged for efforts in another. You'll think "I did extra goodyesterday, so I can take today off" or "I did extra exercise thismorning, so I can ignore my diet this afternoon." Theoretically thesearguments (sometimes) make sense. The problem is that you can't tradeunconsciously -- and that's what habit is supposed to be. So when youtrade, you're no longer tracking habits -- you're keeping aledger of conscious decisions. There is no automation. Yourbehaviors will stay conscious and hard.

Ultimately, the point of a habit tracker isn't to track. Yes, itdoes track, but the tracking is just a means to an end -- building anew habit. When you've reached that goal, you shouldn't need a habittracker. I like to think that the HabitCal is so good at this, itsprimary function, that no one will have to use it for verylong. But it's also so unobtrusive, it takes so little time and energyto keep current, that I could imagine people continuing to use it evenafter they've built firm habits, just to play it safe, and for acontinuing pat on the back for a job well done.

Go ahead. Paper works great. You can get all the primary habitbuilding benefits of the habit traffic light that I described abovejust as well using a physical calendar and some colored markers. Theprimary advantage of the online HabitCal is that you get themotivational benefit of sharing your goals with others. It's alsofree, you can access it from anywhere, and the summary views make iteasy to get a sense of how you're doing over longer periods oftime. You'd also have to buy a lot of paper calendars if you weretracking multiple habits.

Again, by all means, go ahead. The advantage of the bulletin boardis that you aren't limited to one tiny datapoint per habit per day --you can go into all kinds of detail, ask for help, etc. But noteveryone feels the need to do this. And even those who do might ALSOwant to keep a more concise account here. There's no reason you can'tdo both: succinctly quantify your compliance with the HabitCal, thenqualify (if necessary or desired) on the bulletin board. I built theHabitCal on the same underlying system as the bulletin board so oneaccount gives you access to both. I might even put some effort intobetter integrating them some day if people want it, to make it so youcan jump from a calendar entry to a corresponding bulletin boardpost.

Printing the habitcal is a tad annoying: by default, in most webbrowsers, the background color of the cells will not print. It isactually possible to get it to print out with all the colors, but youhave to set your browser to "print background colors." In everybrowser this option is hiding in a different totally obscureplace. Instructions here (thank you Neptunus!)

I want to keep HabitCal pretty spartan... but there are a fewfeatures I'm sure I'd like to add at some point (a bunch of prettysignificant improvements were already added in version2, so it is entirely possible I will get around to some/all ofthese).

2. Add Note: a popular request, but tricky to add to thecurrent interface unobtrusively. The main "use case" is so you canqualify/confess details about failures -- resolving to do this is agood way to keep them limited without adding systematiccomplexity. And you can currently kinda sorta do this by keeping aseparate parallel daily check in thread on the bulletin board, butthat's a little clunky. I'll probably add a "journal view" optimizedfor note viewing and editing and just mark notes with a hyperlinked"*" or something in the other views.

3. Track arbitrary numeric data like weight: this is tricky becauseexcept for the timeline view where it could be drawn as a graph, it'sgoing to be hard to squeeze into the other views (what if the numbersare too big to fit in the date cell? etc).

4. More attractive "RESTful" urls: I doubt anyone caresabout this except other programmers, but I'm a programmer afterall... My primary concern is how to clean them up without breakingexisiting links, because aesthetics ain't worth inconvenience and cool urls neverchange.

#1: please do not post anything that could get youdivorced/fired here. This is the web. It's public. You have to assumethat your boss, your wife, googlebot and the FBI are all looking atit. If you want to track potentially embarrassing habits here,(nothing obviously illegal, please) come up with a good pseudonym.

#2: You've heard of "beta" software? Well, this isalpha software. That means it's very possible, perhaps evenprobable, that one fine morning I will accidentally erase all thoselovely little datapoints you've been painstakingly ticking in formonths. I will really try not to do this (and I do make nightlybackups), but if you can't promise not to kill or sue me if ithappens, PLEASE GO AWAY.

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