The fourth chapter of Atomic Habits by James Clear drills deeper into the concept of making your habits obvious. That’s good and bad habits alike – he talks about explicitly tracking all your regular habits and then marking which ones are positive (+), negative (-) and neutral (=). Calling out and focusing on the habits is better than letting them roll along without thinking about them.

One way you can use the Recurrer app to accomplish this is to use it retroactively. If you find yourself doing something that isn’t in your task list, once you’ve finished doing it, add it to your list and check it off, noting how much time it took. Even if – especially if – it’s a bad habit.

If it’s a bad habit you know you’ve previously entered into the app, do a quick search for it and find out how long it’s been since you last did it. (The app explicitly states how long since you last completed a task.) Edit your task to reflect how often your bad habits recur.

Now the Recurrer app doesn’t just reflect the tasks you want to get done, it also tracks the bad habits that interfere with your life. It will also call out how much of your day it expects you to waste on these bad habits. But before it gets too judgemental on you, this becomes your opportunity to flip the script on the bad habits.

Knowing your bad habits and explicitly tracking them is half the battle. The Recurrer app is a convenient way to start tracking them. We’ll get to how to use the app to counter those habits in a future chapter.