Habit tracker

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.

Each habit carries four small figures and they answer four different questions. Week is the count inside the Monday to Sunday week that today falls in, shown against the target and turning accent-coloured once you reach it. Streak is consecutive calendar days ending today or yesterday. Best is the longest run of consecutive days you have ever recorded for that habit. Month is the share of the shown month's days so far that are ticked, counting only from the day the habit was added.

Take a Friday with two habits. Walk after lunch has a target of five and is ticked on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, so its week pill reads 4/5. Its streak reads 2, because Wednesday breaks the run and the count stops there. Read 10 pages has a target of seven and five ticks from Monday to Friday, so its week pill reads 5/7 and its streak reads 5.

That pair is the thing to understand about the streak number. A habit you deliberately do five days a week can never hold a long streak, and chasing one means working on Saturday for the sake of a counter. For anything below a seven-day target the week pill is the measure that matters and the streak is decoration. Month has a different use again: it is the slow figure that will not move much in a week, which makes it the honest one to compare against last month.

This week at the top of the page pools every habit. It adds up what you have done, capped at each habit's own target, and divides by the sum of the targets. With the two habits above that is four out of five plus five out of seven, so nine over twelve, which shows as 75%.

The cap is the part worth knowing about. Seven ticks on a three-day target still count as three, so a habit you overshoot cannot paper over one you are missing, and the figure stays a measure of how many of your own commitments you kept rather than how busy you were. It also means 100% is reachable without doing anything beyond what you said you would do.

The monthly percentage on each row compares ticks against elapsed days only. On the eighteenth of the month a habit ticked twelve times reads 67%, not 40%, because the days still to come are not counted against you. Days before you added the habit are skipped too, so a habit started on the twentieth begins its first month on a real figure instead of a punishing one. In the grid those days sit faded and refuse to be clicked, along with every date in the future; anything else you can tick or untick long after the fact, which is what makes filling in a forgotten weekend on Monday morning possible.