Habit Tracking in 2024

Software
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Has there been any new habit tracking apps in the last year or so? I haven’t seen much posted about new or updated apps and am wondering what people are using.

James Clear launched a new app called Atoms. I’m a fan of the method, but was hoping for automation
Streaks is on version 9, but never really clicked for me. The UI always felt cumbersome and unintuitive.

I’d like geolocation automation if possible, but maybe tracking it all manually in notes is best?

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Check out Chronicling. Has awesome shortcuts support. You can add an automation for location in shortcuts to add things to it.

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Been using Streaks for years now. It might not be the best one out there, but no subscription and the developer updates it all the time.

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This looks really good, there sure is great support for automation.

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Ditto. Bought and paid for and it does the job. Habit trackers are a category of app I doubt I’ll ever be willing to pay an endless subscription for. It’s a simple thing to do and it’s a minor type of functionality for me.

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One of my biggest use cases right now is return to office compliance. I have to be in 8 days a month. So far Chronicling is hitting the mark to automate that tracking with Shortcuts logged on location or wifi connection.

Not a fan of trying to remember how many days I’ve gotten at the end of the month.

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I used Streaks for a long time, but never really loved using it. I have a couple of gripes:

  • What’s the deal with the name? Show me the streak! I know a binary status toggle is more adaptable, but a chronological history of this week/month/period’s completions is way more compelling imo.
  • Streaks has lots of Shortcuts and great HealthKit support, but it’s very poorly documented. When setting up automations, it was often hard to tell whether something wasn’t supported, or I was just struggling to figure it out.

So I decided to try out Chronicling this year, and I like it quite a bit so far. The subscription price is fair, and I like the shortcuts support and customizability of the views, though it’s pretty rough around the edges and could do with some QoL improvements. HealthKit integration is also sorely lacking. All the more reason to support development at this point, as far as I’m concerned.

There are a couple of other new habit trackers (e.g., HabitKit) that I prefer the look of, but aren’t anywhere near mature enough yet, and my first requirement for a habit app is that it be a good player within the Apple ecosystem. Phone and watch apps at a minimum, with a strong preference for iPad and desktop viewing functionality as well.

I prefer tracking habits that can be recorded passively with either my watch or shortcuts/automations. Unfortunately, Apple itself is the biggest sore spot w/r/t habits. My primary use case is for tracking medication, and they’ve yet to integrate their own medication tracker with Shortcuts or HealthKit.

The next best thing is a robust notification/reminder system that does the legwork for me. I’m pretty close to my ideal setup, which runs Chronicling shortcuts with x-callback urls from Due reminders to log things as I check them off, but I really wish I could integrate my medication reminders and tracking with my actual health data.

Here’s a recent blog post that gives an example of what you can do with Chronicling: Automating My Household Chore Reminders – coeffeciencies

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I haven’t personally used it but the Everyday app looks spectacular!

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Thanks for the write up @jrob! A couple things I thought about when reading it:

  • I use Todoist as my to do app. You can set a task to occur ever X days. Something like every! 30 days will schedule the next task 30 days after you complete it, not 30 days after the last due date. That doesn’t help your weekend tasks, but just thought I’d mention it.
  • I use Google Sheets to keep track of the last time I did X. I created a form for quick input. I have a shortcut to the form on my iPhone’s home screen so I can quickly go to it. I also have Siri Shortcuts that allow me to input data into the form via voice or from my Apple Watch. More details on how to do that here. I created a summary sheet that uses the Google Sheets query function to show me the most recent occurrence and how many days ago it was from today.

It sounds like you have a good system setup for yourself, but wanted to mention a couple tools I use.

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There’s a free version, but the pro version is 150$ CAD per year… That’s crazy expensive…

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I set up something very to similar that in Excel. It’s not as pretty, but it works well and is really easy to set up.

Pretty cool that one is free. Nice looking app.

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lol, to clarify, that’s not my blog. I just thought it was a good insight into Chronicling’s shortcuts integrations.

I like the sound of your system. For those kinds of repetitions I use Things, though I don’t have many of them honestly

I’m really trying to get away with the absolute minimum amount of input for anything resembling data tracking, because the quality (which is to say, the consistency) of my own user-input data is very poor. Health tracking on the watch has been a godsend for this kind of thing, whenever I can hook into the health data and have my own tracking record by itself. Otherwise, the habit tracker categories are really just suggestions.

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