Chapter sixteen of James Clear’s Atomic Habits talks about habit tracking – recording each habit you complete and generating streaks of habits.
Habit tracking encourages you to retain streaks of good habits. The downside is that the tracking is effectively a new habit in itself which may cause friction. Clear therefore recommends that the tracking should be as automated as possible.
Enter Recurrer. The Recurrer app tracks all your tasks, and, in the process, keeps track of when you last completed the task. Tracking repeated tasks is, after all, the entire purpose of the app. And, of course, it does all this automatically without any user intervention. Just as the Atomic Habits book recommends.
The book also advises that if you fall off a habit, the best practice is to get straight back on. Strive to never have two failures in a row, as that’s the start of a new bad habit.
You can easily build this into the Recurrer app – simply set the ideal recurring period of the habit to one day and the maximum recurring period of two days. Now Recurrer will:
- encourage you to do the habit daily, but
- allow a postponement on extremely busy days, although
- if you do postpone, the task will become sufficiently urgent that it jumps to the top of your list the next day
That’s a perfect implementation of habit building.
(Oh, also? If you want to track your habits elsewhere? Say, by marking them off on a calendar. Recurrer can help with that too – set up a task inside it to ‘Update habits on calendar’. Versatility is the name of the game here. Versatility and recurring tasks.)
