Habits that fit into the day you actually have
A flexible habit tracker: set a soft target like three times a week, and plan each habit into your day when it suits you. Missing a day doesn't break anything.
What you can do with Habits
- Plan them into your day. Habits that are still due wait in the tray beside your day planner. Drag one into a gap, and it becomes a real block in a day you can see.
- Soft targets, not daily rules. Set a habit to daily, or a number of times per week, month, quarter or year. "Three times a week" needs no fixed days. Fit them in when you can, no pressure.
- Progress without a streak. Each habit shows where you are this week, like "1 of 3 this week". There's no streak to break and no red mark for yesterday.
- Done counts when it happens. Tick the block done, and the habit moves on to "2 of 3". Once you reach this week's target, it steps out of the tray until next week.
- Start from what you wrote. Select a line in a note, like "I should walk in the mornings", and make it a habit.
Why I wanted a flexible habit tracker
I tried hard. The trackers still made it feel as though missing a day meant I had failed. But sometimes a habit didn't fit the day at all: I forgot, got distracted, or needed a clearer cue. I wanted habits to grow out of the notes where the need first appeared, then find a realistic place in an actual day. No streak should get to overrule a human life.
Rachit, founder of Xale
The ideas behind Habits
A missed day isn't a verdict
Habits form over weeks and months, and one gap doesn't undo them.
- Worth reading: Oliver Burkeman, "Dailyish". A strict every-single-day rule is so fragile that one miss makes people quit, so he aims for "dailyish" instead. oliverburkeman.com/dailyish
- Worth reading: Katy Milkman, in conversation with Behavioral Scientist about her book How to Change. Routines that demand perfect conditions tend to crack under real life, and flexible habits last better. behavioralscientist.org
- In this release: soft weekly targets and "1 of 3 this week", with no streak to lose.
A habit needs a place in the day
A habit happens when it's tied to a real moment, not to a checkbox you hope to remember.
- Worth reading: Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits (2019). Most of what we repeat is set off by our surroundings and routines, more than by willpower.
- The usual way: a habit app on one screen and your day on another, with nothing connecting the two.
- In this release: habits wait in the day planner's tray, and you place each one into the gap it fits.
Further reading
- Phillippa Lally and colleagues, "How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world", European Journal of Social Psychology (2010): a median of 66 days for a habit to feel automatic, and missing one day didn't meaningfully set anyone back. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674
- John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky and Jessica Wisdom, "Creating exercise habits using incentives: The trade-off between flexibility and routinization", Management Science (2021): flexible gym habits held up better than rigid, same-time ones. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706
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