Build your own habit tracker, without a streak to protect

The full walkthrough, from a fresh install to two working categories — or read on for the written version.

The streak decides what counts as a habit

The standard habit app hands you one shape: a thing you do every day, ticked once, with a counter that resets when you miss. It is a good fit for flossing and a bad fit for most of the rest.

You train legs every few days, not every day. You deep-clean the flat about once a month. You take one supplement daily and another only when you remember. Under a daily streak, two of those three read as failure most of the week — not because anything went wrong, but because the tool only knows one rhythm.

A tracker that calls a rest day a failure is measuring its own rules, not your life.

What you actually need is "when did I last do this"

This is the part worth the whole article. In the month view, every mark carries a small number: how many days had passed since the previous time that field was filled. Today's row shows it too, even before you check anything.

So the question you open the app with — what should I do today? — is answered by looking at one row. Legs three days ago, back eight: that is usually enough to decide, and it is a decision a streak counter cannot help you make, because a streak only knows whether the chain is intact.

A gap stops being a failure and becomes the measurement. That reframing is most of what separates this from a checklist app.

Categories are domains, fields are what you track

There are only two concepts to hold. A category is one domain of your life you want to follow: workout, supplements, sleep, work. A field is one specific thing inside it — chest, back, legs, abs.

Nothing forces two categories to look alike, and you add as many as you need. That is the whole structure, and it is why the setup takes about two minutes per domain rather than an evening.

Setting up a habit category

1. Create the category. A name and an emoji, so you recognise it at a glance on the home screen.
2. Add your fields. One per thing you actually want to follow. Leave the data type as checkbox unless you need something else — for most habits a checkbox is the honest answer.
3. Check today. One click on what you did. That is the entire daily cost of the system.
4. Open the Month tab. Rows are days, columns are your fields, and the days-since numbers appear as soon as there is anything to compare.

The month view, and why backfilling matters

Any past cell is clickable. There is no lock-out window, no "you can only log today", no penalty for filling in Tuesday on Thursday.

This sounds minor and is not. Forgetting to log on the day is the single most common way a tracking habit dies: the record drifts from reality, you know it is wrong, and you stop trusting it. Letting you repair the past is what keeps the history worth reading a year later.

Future cells work the same way, in the other direction. Check a day that has not happened yet and it becomes programmed — it shows up in the day view when that day arrives, as something you intended to do.

Beyond a checkbox

The video stays deliberately basic: every field it creates is a checkbox. The daily side goes considerably further, and this is what is waiting once the structure makes sense.

• Other field types. A number (glasses of water), a rating with stars, levels or moods (sleep quality), a timer (time spent, optionally attributed to a specific project or film), a checklist, a free note.
• Quotas. A target over a period, with a gauge that fills as you go.
• Contracts. The rhythm you want to hold — three sessions a week. This is where streaks live, and they count periods you held rather than consecutive days, which is the version of a streak that survives contact with a real schedule.
• Scores. Turn a category's fields into a single number per day, and a graph over time.

Where the data lives

Your categories and their entire history are stored locally on your device — that is the whole storage model, with no server copy that counts as the real one. In practice:

• No account. Open it and create a category. Registration exists only for the optional cloud plan, which adds sync and backup.
• It works with no connection. Daily tracking never touches the network.
• Queryable. On desktop the database is a plain SQLite file: open it in any SQLite browser and ask it things no menu offers.
• It is not a habit app. The same database also holds your films, books, games and shows. One tool, one file, one backup.

An honest comparison

Dedicated habit apps do things this does not, and the trade is a real one rather than a marketing point.

The last two are genuine losses. If what makes you do the thing is a notification at 8am or a guild that notices when you skip, a dedicated app is built for that and this is not. What you get instead is a record that bends to your rhythms rather than the reverse, sitting in the same database as everything else you keep track of, on hardware you own.

Frequently asked questions