Habits

Habit tracker

Check off the habits you kept today, then look at the month grid to see what your week actually looked like. Streaks, weekly targets and monthly rates are worked out for you. Everything stays in this browser.

Habits tracked

Checked today

0/0

Best current streak

days

This week

Of weekly targets

Today

No habits yet. Add one below. Two is a good number to start with.

Add a habit

Enter adds it

Month grid

The grid fills in once you have a habit and a check or two.

About the famous 66 days: that number is the median from a single small study (Lally and colleagues, 2010, 82 participants), and the individual results ranged from 18 to 254 days. The same study found that missing one day had no measurable effect on how automatic the behaviour became. A gap in the grid is a gap, not a reset.

How to use it

Start with one or two habits, not eight. A tracker with two rows gets opened every day; a tracker with eight rows turns into a list of things you are failing at, and then it stops getting opened at all. Add the third habit only once the first two run without you thinking about them.

Anchor each habit to something already fixed in your day. "Read 10 pages" is vague about when. "Read 10 pages after I put the kettle on" borrows the reliability of a routine you already have, and the existing routine becomes the reminder. Pick an anchor that happens at a stable time and place, and put it in the habit name so you see it every time you check the box.

Write down a floor version of every habit for bad days: two pages instead of ten, or five minutes of exercise instead of forty. The floor version still counts as a check. What you are protecting is the pattern of showing up, and a five-minute session on a terrible day protects it better than a skipped day followed by a guilty week.

Set the weekly target to what you can actually sustain rather than the ideal. A 4-days-per-week target you hit most weeks beats a 7-day target you miss by two days every week and feel bad about. You can raise the target later from the dropdown next to each habit.

Frequently asked questions

How many habits should I track at once?

One or two to begin with, and rarely more than four or five at a time. Each new habit competes for the same attention and the same awkward moments in your day, so adding them in a batch tends to sink all of them. Get one running on its own before you add the next.

What target should I set?

Pick the number of days you would hit in a bad week, not a good one. Daily habits (7 per week) work well for small things tied to a fixed routine, like a morning stretch. For anything that needs a block of time, 3 or 4 days per week is usually more honest and leaves room for the days that go wrong.

Does missing a day ruin my streak?

Not in any way that matters to the habit. In the Lally et al. (2010) study, missing a single day had no measurable effect on how automatic the behaviour became; what mattered was repeating it in a consistent context over weeks. This page keeps a streak alive until a full day passes with no check, so a late evening does not wipe it out, and the month grid shows the pattern rather than a single number. If you break a run, start the next one tomorrow instead of writing off the month.

Where is my data stored?

In this browser's local storage, under the key cc-habits. Nothing is sent anywhere, so your habits do not sync between devices and clearing site data clears them.

Reference: Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle, "How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world", European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010. See also the weekly review guide for a regular check on which habits are still worth tracking.