Honestly, none of them have worked for me.
One of the problems has been that many of the things I want to do more of are not all-or-none. I want to read more—there isn’t a right number of how many articles I should read in the day, though. So a good habit tracker should let me key in every article I’ve read in a day.
The second problem I’ve had is with streak-based motivators. I don’t really feel a connection between the number of days I’ve done something for and whether I do it today.
I have been tempted to buy into Fabulous. The narrative and progressive structure of the habit-building is really interesting… but it is quite expensive.
I really liked Done, because the amount you fill up its bars is arbitrary and fits most habits of mine better than a checkbox:
The most success I’ve had with conventional habit tracking has actually come from Habitica, because there are a variety of different kinds of habits. It just seems to fit reality better than the alternatives. However, I could care less about the game layer they add on top. If I ever dust off my programming skills and do app development, I’d love to develop something like Habitica without the shallow gamification. (It’s possible to ignore the game stuff, but it’s ever-present.)
The most important app that’s led to my habits success? Due. You can’t stuff it with things or it’ll be useless, but it works wonderful for those things that really need to happen but that you sometimes miss the opportunity to do.
Finally, a shout out to ShineDay, which is just gorgeous and actually is localized to English (even though it doesn’t look like it from the screenshots):
It looks like people keep pumping out habit trackers, so I haven’t explored some of the releases that have come out in the past six months or so. Maybe there’s something new out there that is better than these options.