Decided to update Apple Store screenshots of my Habit Pocket app. This time they turned our better because the previous ones had too much text and it was hard to read. So I decided to make they more clean with large picture and large caption.
So the idea of my projects was to have one place where I can track different things and expand the idea of classic habit. Instead of tracking "Slept 8hr" as done or not done I prefer to track actual wake up and bed time. Exact calories, the time of my last mean and activities I've done during the day.
Here is the core idea:
Roughly two years ago I changed the way I track my habits. I was using classic habits like done or not done e.g. walk 10,000 steps, sleep 8hr.
The problem I've noticed that when I have very busy day but still managed to go for a walk in the evening I walked, let's say, 7300 steps. And here is the question, having "10k steps" habit should I mark it as done or not done. Both options are wrong to me.
If I mark as done - obviously it's not true. If I mark as not done - I'll nullify all my effort.
In general the goal itself was fine. The problem was how I track it - "toggle switch". A toggle switch has two positions: done or not done.
I replaced it with slider. By it's nature slider has multiple intermediate values and in my case the minimum value is the lowest effort I can do. In case of steps it's roughly 4,000. Anything above that threshold counts. Roughly speaking, 7,412 is great, and 12,000 is absolutely awesome.
And you can apply this to anything like the gym. Set a minimum of at least 10 minutes. If I’ve already made it to the gym and just worked out for less time than usual, that’s still great - at least I wasn’t sitting at home in front of the computer.
There’s a biological explanation for this. A habit is a connection between neurons, and those connections strengthen when signals are sent frequently, not intensely. Two intense workouts a week equal two signals. Seven short ones equal seven signals - stronger connection.
So based on this idea I built my app!
Roughly two years ago I changed the way I track my habits. I was using classic habits like done or not done e.g. walk 10,000 steps, sleep 8hr.
The problem I've noticed that when I have very busy day but still managed to go for a walk in the evening I walked, let's say, 7300 steps. And here is the question, having "10k steps" habit should I mark it as done or not done. Both options are wrong to me.
If I mark as done - obviously it's not true. If I mark as not done - I'll nullify all my effort.
In general the goal itself was fine. The problem was how I track it - "toggle switch". A toggle switch has two positions: done or not done.
I replaced it with slider. By it's nature slider has multiple intermediate values and in my case the minimum value is the lowest effort I can do. In case of steps it's roughly 4,000. Anything above that threshold counts. Roughly speaking, 7,412 is great, and 12,000 is absolutely awesome.
And you can apply this to anything like the gym. Set a minimum of at least 10 minutes. If I’ve already made it to the gym and just worked out for less time than usual, that’s still great - at least I wasn’t sitting at home in front of the computer.
There’s a biological explanation for this. A habit is a connection between neurons, and those connections strengthen when signals are sent frequently, not intensely. Two intense workouts a week equal two signals. Seven short ones equal seven signals - stronger connection.
So take the number you’d manage even on your worst day, and set that as your minimum. Not the number the person you plan to become would manage. That person is constantly canceling plans.
I wish I could attach picture here I draw to show the idea but I cannot
Hello everyone,
Almost two years since reading David Goggins book "Can't Hurt Me" I've decided to make one more attempt to change something in my life. I've tried lots and lots of different applications for tracking habits, but most of them require to have a phone and there are almost no applications for desktop or even web. Especially it become a problem when you try to avoid your phone as much as possible but you need to enter your habits.
One day opened Number (Excel alternative by Apple) and decided to make my own tracker. For me it's very important to not only track "boolean" habits like done or not but also some metrics such as: when I go to bed, wake-up time, number of calories eaten.
Basically instead of marking "slept 8hr" with done or not done I actually track my wake-up and bed time. Same for steps.
I have a bunch of formatting rules for each habit, for done/undone I use green and red. Gray means that I skipped this day for some reason.
After few month of tracking I realized that I'm not skipping tracking my habits. And here is why:
So this is my habit tracking system, I've attached older screenshot from previous year with some fake data because I'm not fully comfortable to share my current metrics right now, but the system itself didn't change at all.
I also building an application based on this approach for myself so I don't need to have a files so maybe somewhere in the future I will share with you.
After using this spreadsheet for year and a half I decided to finally build my own app which works in browser and ios - https://habitpocket.io/
My main goal was to remove this feeling of AI slop when looking at my landing page and increase conversion. So I decided to not only rework the landing page intself but also add interactive demo into the hero section of landing page.
Also I decided to shift positioning to "track everything", because my app is basically allow users to track not only regular habits but all kind of different metrics.
I hope it will help with conversion, because I have pretty good traffic but very low registrations
Roughly two years ago I changed the way I track my habits. I was using classic habits like done or not done e.g. walk 10,000 steps, sleep 8hr.
The problem I've noticed that when I have very busy day but still managed to go for a walk in the evening I walked, let's say, 7300 steps. And here is the question, having "10k steps" habit should I mark it as done or not done. Both options are wrong to me.
If I mark as done - obviously it's not true. If I mark as not done - I'll nullify all my effort.
In general the goal itself was fine. The problem was how I track it - "toggle switch". A toggle switch has two positions: done or not done.
I replaced it with slider. By it's nature slider has multiple intermediate values and in my case the minimum value is the lowest effort I can do. In case of steps it's roughly 4,000. Anything above that threshold counts. Roughly speaking, 7,412 is great, and 12,000 is absolutely awesome.
And you can apply this to anything like the gym. Set a minimum of at least 10 minutes. If I’ve already made it to the gym and just worked out for less time than usual, that’s still great - at least I wasn’t sitting at home in front of the computer.
There’s a biological explanation for this. A habit is a connection between neurons, and those connections strengthen when signals are sent frequently, not intensely. Two intense workouts a week equal two signals. Seven short ones equal seven signals - stronger connection.
So take the number you’d manage even on your worst day, and set that as your minimum. Not the number the person you plan to become would manage. That person is constantly canceling plans.
It was actually based on this logic that I built my habit tracker - Habit Pocket. There, you can track both time and numbers. And, of course, regular, classic habits.
For numbers and time, you can add “conditional formatting” so that the cell background color changes depending on the value.
Hey everyone!
I just want to share an app - Habit Pocket. I built to track my habits and other metrics I like. For me the biggest problem of most trackers is limitation by only habit done and not done state.
But I prefer to track my actual effort and be consistent with using actual numbers. For example I have a goal to walk 10k steps everyday. What if I walked 9k, it's not a 10k but definitely good!
This is why I like to track actual numbers and time. In my case it help me stick to the habits better. Because showing up every day even if it's half of the goal is very important and for myself I like to see any effort I put.
Same with skip, I added support of skips because sometime I can go camping for 3-5 days and I'm not able to do some things, so I need to decide to loose my streak or mark it done and ruin stats. So this is why skips can be handy
Hey everyone!
I just want to share an app - Habit Pocket. I built to track my habits and other metrics I like. For me the biggest problem of most trackers is limitation by only habit done and not done state.
But I prefer to track my actual effort and be consistent with using actual numbers. For example I have a goal to walk 10k steps everyday. What if I walked 9k, it's not a 10k but definitely good!
This is why I like to track actual numbers and time. In my case it help me stick to the habits better. Because showing up every day even if it's half of the goal is very important and for myself I like to see any effort I put.
Same with skip, I added support of skips because sometime I can go camping for 3-5 days and I'm not able to do some things, so I need to decide to loose my streak or mark it done and ruin stats. So this is why skips can be handy
Recently I finished new integration for my app Habit Pocket to support pulling data from the Apple Health.
Why health metrics in habit tracker?
My goal is to extend the classic habit tracking app with ability to track more things like numbers, time, lists and other stuff.
Before I built this app (web and ios) I used apple numbers (excel) spreadsheet to track all my stuff. For example I don't track that I slept or not 8 hr, instead I track exact wake-time and when I go to the bed. Same for other things.
Now I don't need to manually input steps, weight and other things then will be automatically synced to the app.
So I can track more data and analyze it using built-in charts or use MCP and AI of choice to analyze it and find some correlations.
I would like to hear your feedback as well as how do you track values beyond classic habits!
I launched Habit Pocket here about a two month ago, a habit tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their own data (the origin was my own tracking spreadsheet).
The core idea is that a streak doesn't tell you much, so beyond yes/no you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, then chart any metric against any other to answer things like "does my sleep follow my bedtime?".
Today I released new version of my habit tracking app - Habit Pocket with new features such as:
I launched Habit Pocket here about a two month ago, a habit tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their own data (the origin was my own tracking spreadsheet).
The core idea is that a streak doesn't tell you much, so beyond yes/no you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, then chart any metric against any other to answer things like "does my sleep follow my bedtime?".
Today I released new version of my habit tracking app - Habit Pocket with new features such as:
I launched Habit Pocket here about a two month ago, a habit tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their own data (the origin was my own tracking spreadsheet).
The core idea is that a streak doesn't tell you much, so beyond yes/no you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, then chart any metric against any other to answer things like "does my sleep follow my bedtime?".
Today I released new version of my habit tracking app - Habit Pocket with new features such as:
I launched Habit Pocket here about a two month ago, a habit tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their own data (the origin was my own tracking spreadsheet).
The core idea is that a streak doesn't tell you much, so beyond yes/no you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, then chart any metric against any other to answer things like "does my sleep follow my bedtime?".
Today I released new version of my habit tracking app - Habit Pocket with new features such as:
I launched Habit Pocket here about a two month ago, a habit tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their own data (the origin was my own tracking spreadsheet).
The core idea is that a streak doesn't tell you much, so beyond yes/no you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, then chart any metric against any other to answer things like "does my sleep follow my bedtime?".
Today I released new version of my habit tracking app - Habit Pocket with new features such as:
Today I released new version of my habit tracking app - Habit Pocket with new features such as:
I launched Habit Pocket here about a two month ago, a habit tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their own data (the origin was my own tracking spreadsheet).
The core idea is that a streak doesn't tell you much, so beyond yes/no you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, then chart any metric against any other to answer things like "does my sleep follow my bedtime?". It runs on web and iOS with sync, privacy-first with full data export.
Quick share for this sub. I make Habit Pocket, a habit + metrics tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their data (it started as my own spreadsheet). Beyond simple yes/no habits, you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, so there's actually rich data to work with.
The part relevant here: I built an MCP server for it. Once you connect it to Claude, you're not stuck clicking around the app anymore, you can just talk to your data:
It's the feature I'm most excited about because it turns a tracker into something conversational, the data goes in and comes out in plain language instead of forms and grids.
A couple of other nice bits: conditional styling (cells change color by value, so a month reads like a heatmap), and web + iOS with sync and full data export.
I would like to share with you how I track important things for myself.
I've tried lots and lots of different applications for tracking habits, but most of them require to have a phone and there are almost no applications for desktop or even web. Especially it become a problem when you try to avoid your phone as much as possible but you need to enter your habits.
First version
One day opened Number (Excel alternative by Apple) and decided to make my own tracker. For me it's very important to not only track "boolean" habits like done or not but also some metrics such as: when I go to bed, wake-up time, number of calories eaten.
I have a bunch of formatting rules for each habit, for done/undone I use green and red. Gray means that I skipped this day for some reason.
After few month of tracking I realized that I'm not skipping tracking my habits. And here is why:
You can use my Excel/Number template here if you want: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XnhPEZBrt3CqLzdTjrFNxOxEtQBRADX6?usp=sharing
Second version
After 1-2 years of using spreadsheet I finally decided to build my own app around this entire concept of spreadsheet and add some extra features.
The idea is the same: track classic habits, track numbers like calories, steps and time of the day. Also it's possible to build some nice custom graphs to find correlation and answer the questions like: "Why am I dead by 3 p.m.?" or "Where do my days vanish?" etc.
I would love to hear your feedback!
Quick share for this sub. I make Habit Pocket, a habit + metrics tracker built for people who like to track everything and find correlations in their data (it started as my own spreadsheet). Beyond simple yes/no habits, you can track numbers, clock times, and custom select lists, so there's actually rich data to work with.
The part relevant here: I built an MCP server for it. Once you connect it to Claude, you're not stuck clicking around the app anymore, you can just talk to your data:
It's the feature I'm most excited about because it turns a tracker into something conversational, the data goes in and comes out in plain language instead of forms and grids.
A couple of other nice bits: conditional styling (cells change color by value, so a month reads like a heatmap), and web + iOS with sync and full data export.
Registration is optional and not required
I'd been kicking around the idea of a habit-tracking app for a while, but I wasn't sure it was worth the months of my time.
So before committing, I did something smaller. I'd been tracking my own habits and metrics in an Excel/Numbers spreadsheet for years, so I cleaned that up into a template and posted it on Reddit. And it landed, with people actually using it. That was the signal I was looking for. If a plain spreadsheet of my personal system resonated with strangers, the app version had a real audience.
That feedback is what pushed me to actually finish and ship the app, Habit Pocket. It's the same system, just not stuck in a spreadsheet. The core:
The takeaway I'd pass to anyone here still deciding whether to build: ship the cheapest version of your idea first, even if it's just the spreadsheet or doc you already use, and let real feedback fund the decision instead of your own optimism. The template cost me an afternoon and de-risked months of work.
Where I'm at now: launched about a month ago, 3 paid users.