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Habit Tracker

Most habit advice fails for the same reason: it is written by people who have never had a bad week. You build a beautiful system in September because September is when you have time. Then week six happens, the system needs fifteen minutes a day, and the fifteen minutes do not exist, and now you have not just missed a day — you have failed at something, and failing at something is how a habit stops.

So the design goal here is not motivation. It is that a bad day costs as little as possible. Tick one box, move on, and let the numbers tell you the truth even when the truth is ugly. A tracker that makes you feel behind is worse than no tracker, because it becomes a reason to stop looking.

Add up to twelve habits. The grid runs backwards from today, so the newest days are on the right, and days after today are greyed out — you cannot tick a day that has not happened, which sounds obvious and which apparently needed saying.

Tick off the days you actually did the thing. The grid runs backwards from today, so the left-hand columns are the most recent, and it works out streaks, completion rates, and whether you hit each habit’s weekly target. No account, nothing saved to the internet.

The weekly target is how many days a week you mean to do it — 5 is not always achievable, 3 might be the honest number. The minutes column only matters if a habit takes time (a study block, a run); leave it blank for the ones that take two minutes. Days after today are greyed out, because you cannot tick a day that has not happened yet.

What each habit tracks

Three fields, and the third is optional.

  • The habit — whatever the actual thing is. “Read” is not a habit; “Read 20 pages” is. You will not know which one you wrote until month three.
  • Days a week — your honest target, not your ideal one. This is the field people set wrong. Five days a week is only a target if five days a week survives a bad week, and for most people a target that gets missed is worse than a lower one that gets met, because the miss is what breaks the chain.
  • Minutes a day — only for habits that take real time: a study block, a run, practice. Blank it for the ones that take two minutes, and the time column stays blank rather than showing a flattering zero.

The window is 7, 14, 28, or 56 days, defaulting to 28. Four weeks is the shortest span that tells you anything true about a habit, because anything shorter is dominated by whether you happened to have a good weekend.

Streaks, and why the current one is the honest one

Two numbers per habit, and they are not measuring the same thing.

Best streak is the longest run of consecutive ticked days inside the window. It is nice to look at and it is completely useless for deciding what to do, because it describes a period that has already passed.

Current streak counts backwards from the most recent day. It is the only number that changes what you do tomorrow, because it is the one with a number attached to it. This is also the number that goes to zero the moment you miss one day, and the tool is deliberately blunt about that rather than softening it into something that feels better and tells you less.

If your current streak is always zero and your best streak is nine, you have not got a discipline problem. You have a design problem — the habit is too small to survive an interruption, and it needs to be halved until it does not.

Completion rate and weekly targets

Completion rate = days ticked ÷ days available × 100

Days available means days in your window up to today. Future days are excluded, so on day three of a 28-day window you are being measured against 3 days, not 28. A tool that measured you against the full window from the start would show you 10% on day three and make a normal week look like a collapse.

Separately, each habit is checked against its own days-a-week target over the last seven days, and the summary says how many you hit. That is the number that actually matters week to week, and it is deliberately a different number from the completion rate, because a 4-day target with 4 days ticked is a 100% success and a 5-day target with 4 days ticked is 80% — which sounds like failure and is not. The completion rate measures consistency; the target measures whether you hit the number you set.

A worked example

Three habits over 28 days, ending 30 September:

  • Read 20 pages — target 5 days a week, 30 minutes. Ticked every day of the last 7. 7 of 7 against target, current streak 7, best streak 7.
  • Study block — target 6 days a week, 120 minutes. Ticked 4 days of the last 7. Misses the target, current streak 4.
  • Gym — target 3 days a week. Ticked 1 day in the window.

That is 12 ticked habit-days out of 84 available — 14.3% overall, which sounds catastrophic and is not a very useful number. It is low partly because the 28-day window is catching a bad fortnight, and partly because the completion rate treats missing the gym once as equal to not reading at all, which is not how the week actually felt.

So the tool reports the per-habit rows and the weekly target count as the primary output, with the overall rate as context. One of three habits met its target. Read 20 pages is the strongest at 25% over the window. Gym is the weakest, and the honest response to that is not to try harder at the gym — it is to change the target to 2 days a week, hit it, and let a met target rebuild the habit before raising it again.

The minutes column gives you the other number worth having: 7 × 30 plus 4 × 120 equals 690 minutes, or 11.5 hours, across the 28 days. If that is study time, it belongs somewhere that turns it into points — the assignment tracker is where hours become course points, and the GPA report is where the finished course grades become a number. Time logged on a habit grid is a resource, not a result.

Printing it

The Print button gives you a dated summary sheet: the date range, the habit count, the ticks out of slots, the overall rate with a bar, the full per-habit table including targets, rates, last seven days, both streaks, and time logged, and a closing note.

Print it monthly rather than daily. Daily is how a tracker becomes a punishment, and monthly is how it becomes information. Put the printed sheet somewhere you will see it at the end of the month, and use it to answer one question: which of these do I keep, which do I shrink, and which do I drop entirely? A habit you have quietly abandoned but not deleted is costing you a row of guilt every day for no benefit.

What the tool will not do

Three things, on purpose.

  • No accounts and no storage. The ticks live in the page and disappear when you close the tab. That is what the privacy policy promises for the whole site, and I would rather the tracker be forgettable than have your daily behaviour in a database somewhere. The printed sheet is the backup.
  • No streak freezes or forgiveness. A missed day resets the current streak and that is the honest reading. A tool that forgives is a tool that tells you a story you would not tell a friend.
  • No predictions. Nothing here forecasts next week. I do not have your data, your term, or your week, and any tool claiming to is guessing.

Frequently asked questions

How many habits should I track?

Three, and I would fight anyone who says five. More than three and the grid gets wide, the checking takes longer, and the habits start competing for the same tired evening. If you genuinely have five things you are not missing, use twelve — the tool allows it — but start with three and add when a slot opens rather than on day one. Most people end up with two that matter and one they thought they needed.

What counts as a day if the habit only partly happened?

Tick it, if you would defend it. Read 12 pages instead of 20, ticked. Skimmed the summary at midnight, not ticked. The number is only useful as a description of what you actually did, so an optimistic tick train poisons the whole grid — and you will know, because the completion rate will look great and the results will not follow.

Should my days-a-week target change over the term?

Yes, and lower is usually the right direction. Exam season is not the time to add a habit. If a target is being missed more weeks than it is met, the target is wrong rather than you being — drop it a step, hold it for two weeks, then consider raising it. The tool has no opinion about what your target should be, because it cannot know your week, and it does not want to be the thing that makes you feel bad about a number you chose.

How do I stop a habit without the guilt?

Delete the row, on purpose, with a decision rather than a drift. Abandoned rows are the worst part of any tracker — they sit there at 8% dragging the overall rate and reminding you daily. If the answer is no, Remove the habit and let the remaining ones have the evening. That is a good outcome, not a failure.

Does this connect to my grades at all?

Not directly, and I would not pretend otherwise. There is no honest way to convert “days read” into grade points, and any tool that does is making something up. The connection is one step removed: the minutes column tells you how much time you put in, the assignment tracker tells you what the work you finished was worth, and the GPA report tells you the number your registrar will publish. Habits are the input, grades are the output, and pretending the middle step is arithmetic is how people end up demotivated by a spreadsheet.

Other tools

Set a target you can hit in a bad week. Tick the days you did the thing. Everything else is bookkeeping, and bookkeeping is the part you are allowed to do badly.

Related GPA tools