Habit tracker: paper, spreadsheet or app, and how to use one
What a habit tracker should record, when a paper grid or a spreadsheet is enough, and what an app adds: a forgiven day, a freeze and friends.
A habit tracker is a record of one plain fact per day: did you do the thing or not. Everything else, the colors, the charts, the streak counter, is built on top of that one mark. The format you pick matters less than whether you will make the mark tomorrow, and the day after.
What to track
Track an action you can finish in a day and answer with yes or no. "Read 10 pages" works. "Become a reader" does not, because no single evening can settle it.
A few rules hold for any tracker:
- One habit to start, three at most. Each new line on the sheet is one more thing to remember every evening.
- The same cue every day. In a widely cited study of habit formation, people tied their new behavior to a fixed moment such as "after breakfast" (Lally et al., 2010). It makes sense to put the check-in at that same moment.
- A start date and an end date. An open-ended habit has no finish line. A 30-day or 75-day run gives you a point to stop and decide whether to go on.
- Quitting counts as a habit too. "No sugar today" or "no social media today" is tracked the same way as "ran today". The mark means the day was clean.
Paper
A paper tracker is a grid: habits down the side, days across the top, a box to fill each evening. It costs nothing, needs no account, and sits where you can see it.
To make one, draw a table with a column for each day of the month and a row per habit. Here is the shape:
| Habit | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read 10 pages | x | x | x | x | |||
| Water, 2 liters | x | x | x | x |
Paper has two weak points. It lives in one place, so a trip or a busy week means a run of empty boxes you fill in from memory. And a gap looks the same whether you missed one day or quit altogether, which makes it easy to read one blank box as failure.
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a paper grid that counts for you. Put dates in column A, one habit per column, a 1 or a 0 in each cell. A formula can count the current run of ones and the percentage of days done.
It suits people who already live in spreadsheets and want their own charts. The cost is setup and upkeep. A spreadsheet will not tell you that today is still open, and it treats a missed day however your formula says, usually as a reset to zero.
App
An app does three things paper cannot. It is in your pocket at the moment of the habit. It knows what day it is and how much of it is left. And it can apply rules to the streak that you would otherwise have to keep in your head, such as what happens after one missed day.
That last point is where trackers differ most. A strict counter drops to zero after one miss. In Lally's study, missing a single opportunity "did not materially affect the habit formation process" (Lally et al., 2010). A tracker that wipes out 40 days for one bad evening punishes something that barely matters, and that can be the moment someone gives up. More on this in how long it takes to form a habit.
How to use any tracker
- Pick one habit and write it as a daily yes or no.
- Choose the moment you will mark it, tied to something you already do.
- Set a length. Thirty days makes a manageable first run.
- Mark the day as soon as it is done. Waiting until bedtime is how a day gets forgotten.
- After a miss, mark the next day. One gap leaves the run in place.
- At the end date, look at the grid and decide: stop, keep going, or change the habit.
Where Break3 fits
Break3 is a habit tracker from INITE, free for now, that works in the browser and in Telegram. It has presets for the common habits (quit smoking, quit porn, no sugar, quit alcohol, exercise, meditation, reading, drinking water, sleep schedule, no social media) and a custom one, each with a start and an end date up to a year out.
You check in once a day per habit, with an optional note and up to four photos, and a countdown shows how long is left until midnight. Each habit keeps its own streak, and the rules for missing are written down, so you don't have to invent them:
- one missed day is forgiven automatically;
- a freeze, set ahead of time, protects the streak for 3 days;
- a broken streak can be restored within a week, once every 90 days per habit.
You can also run a habit as a group challenge for 2 to 50 people, each with their own streak. How streaks work explains every rule in detail, and the FAQ answers the short questions.
Related reading: the 75 Soft challenge, the no sugar challenge and the NoFap timeline.