On missing a day

I built a habit tracker into an early version of this app. It had a streak counter, because every habit tracker has one.

I used it for eleven days. On day twelve I was ill. On day thirteen I opened the app, saw the counter had gone back to zero, and did not open it again for a month.

That comes down to design, not willpower.

What a streak actually measures

A streak counts consecutive days. That is all it can see. It cannot tell the difference between "I gave up" and "I had flu", and it treats both the same way, by deleting the evidence that you ever showed up.

For a lot of people that sting is motivating. Fine. For the people this app is for, it lands differently. If you have spent years being told you are inconsistent, an app that resets to zero just confirms what you already believed about yourself, in a bright color, on a screen you chose to open.

What we do instead

The streak goes back to zero. I want to be straight about that, because plenty of apps imply otherwise and it is never quite true.

What changes is what the app does with that fact. The badge turns into a heart rather than a broken flame. The routine card still shows its heatmap, so all eleven days you did show up are still sitting there in plain sight. And if you actually did the thing and just forgot to log it, you can back-date it.

Same zero. Nothing turns red, and nothing tells you that you lost something.

Overdue tasks work the same way. They do not pile up in an angry list. They wait, and get quietly moved to a day that has room.

None of this makes you more consistent. I want to be honest about that. What it does is remove one specific reason to stop, which turns out to matter more than I expected.

Some days are just hard. The app should not make them harder.