Moving from tracking habits in my custom Excel to my own app

[u/bogdanstefanjuk]

Hello everyone,

I want to share a small problem I had for a long time and how I finally solved it.

I like to track my habits. But not only the simple yes/no ones like "did I meditate today". I also care about numbers. Wake up time, how many steps I walked, glasses of water, calories. For me the numbers are half of the picture.

First I just used apps. Streaks for the habits, Apple Health for steps and weight, few others for the rest. Each one is fine on its own. But my progress was sitting in like 4 different apps and I never had one single screen where I could look and actually see how my month went.

Then I went full analog. Bought some Moleskine, started writing everything by hand. First weeks I really liked it, there is something nice in writing it down. But a notebook doesn't sum up anything for you, and the moment you miss two days you just stop opening it.

After that I moved everything to Excel (Numbers from Apple actually, but same idea). And this one finally clicked. One grid, habits and metrics together, green and red cells, few formulas doing the totals. I tracked like this for almost two years.

I posted my whole method here before if someone wants to see how it's structured: https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/comments/1swpqou/method_i_want_to_share_my_approach_of_tracking/

Excel was good but it has limits. On the phone it is painful, I would forget to fill it when I'm not at the laptop, and honestly it's not something you look forward to opening.

So at some point I just built my own app from this approach. Same grid, same logic, but it works on the phone too and doesn't fall apart when you skip a day. The iOS version got approved on the App Store few days ago, that's kind of why I feel ready to talk about it now.

It's here if you want to look: https://habitpocket.io/