What is the HabitCal Habit Calendar?

HabitCal is a free online tool for tracking (and more importantly, building) good habits -- like diet and exercise. I came up with it specifically for my everyday systems habits, but you could use it for any habit you like.

How it works

First, if you haven't already, create an everyday systems bulletin board account and log in. You'll then be redirected to this page except now that we know who you are there will be a personalized greeting with an edit link at the top.

On the edit page, you'll see an empty list of "tags." Click on the "add" link next to this list to add a one word (no spaces) tag for the behavior you'd like to track (tag=term, for the web 2.0 uninitiated) (browse other people's tags here). Then chose the time frame you want, make sure the habit you want to track is selected (you have to choose it from the list even if it's the only item there), and hit "show." A calendar will display for each month in the selected time frame for each habit. Mark green=success/yellow=exempt/red=failure (the habit traffic light) every day until you're no longer interested in tracking the habit. At the end of a month or a year, you'll have a striking visual picture of how well you complied with your desired behavioral goal. You can track several behaviors at the same time, and the interface makes it easy to set multiple days of input at once. If the full traffic light is too much, just use negative tracking to tick off failures when they happen.

Besides your personal edit view, there is also a public view that you can share with friends and random people on the internet (NOTE: nothing here is private -- see disclaimer below). Just click "switch to public view" on the top of your edit page to see what this looks like.

What it looks like

Here is a screenshot of an edit screen (the view screen is the same minus the row of edit controls):

You can see my personal public view HabitCal here.

A psychologically sound habit tracker

Why did I come up with my own habit tracking system instead of using one of the (technically) excellent ones already out there? Because none of them work quite the way I want them to. They use complicated scoring systems that encourage bad ways of thinking about habit. When you are building a habit, you want to focus on a sustainable minimum level of compliance: either you do what is required, or you don't (or you are exempt that day). Quantifying success beyond this is counterproductive. Why? Well, first off, it's more complicated, but more importantly it's bad because you'll start to want to trade points -- to think that heroic efforts yesterday can buy off the need to do anything today. Or that efforts in one area can be exchanged for efforts in another. You'll think "I did extra good yesterday, so I can take today off" or "I did extra exercise this morning, so I can ignore my diet this afternoon." Theoretically these arguments (sometimes) make sense. The problem is that you can't trade unconsciously -- and that's what habit is supposed to be. So when you trade, you're no longer tracking habits -- you're keeping a ledger of conscious decisions. There is no automation. Your behaviors will stay conscious and hard.

Ultimately, the point of a habit tracker isn't to track. Yes, it does track, but the tracking is just a means to an end -- building a new habit. When you've reached that goal, you shouldn't need a habit tracker. I like to think that the HabitCal is so good at this, its primary function, that no one will have to use it for very long. But it's also so unobtrusive, it takes so little time and energy to keep current, that I could imagine people continuing to use it even after they've built firm habits, just to play it safe, and for a continuing pat on the back for a job well done.

Why not use a paper calendar?

Go ahead. Paper works great. You can get all the primary habit building benefits of the habit traffic light that I described above just as well using a physical calendar and some colored markers. The primary advantage of the online HabitCal is that you get the motivational benefit of sharing your goals with others. It's also free, you can access it from anywhere, and eventually I'll add ways to compute summary compliance statistics (like Personal Olympics Medals).

Why not just use the daily checkin on the bulletin board?

Again, by all means, go ahead. The advantage of the bulletin board is that you aren't limited to one tiny datapoint per habit per day -- you can go into all kinds of detail, ask for help, etc. But not everyone feels the need to do this. And even those who do might ALSO want to keep a more concise account here. There's no reason you can't do both: succinctly quantify your compliance with the HabitCal, then qualify (if necessary or desired) on the bulletin board. I built the HabitCal on the same underlying system as the bulletin board so one account gives you access to both. I might even put some effort into better integrating them some day if people want it, to make it so you can jump from a calendar entry to a corresponding bulletin board post.

Post the the HabitCal discussion thread or email me.

Planned Enhancements

I want to keep HabitCal pretty spartan... but there are a few features I'm sure I'd like to add at some point (if anyone actually winds up using it).

• Compute Summary Stats (like personal olympics medals or some kind of summmary compliance score per month or whatever period)
• Autocomplete/suggestion of habit tags (so there aren't a plethora of nosdiet spelling variants)
• Linear day view instead of just month boxes
• Some kind of data dump so you can download your data and muck around with it in excel or whatever
• Some way to add comments (like excuses). Maybe it would draw an asterisk over dates when you added a comment and if you clicked it or moused over a window would pop up with the whole sad story. You would be able to apply a comment across multiple tags.

Browser support

It should work in recent versions of Firefox, IE, and safari. No idea about others. I'm just one guy doing this in my spare time. I barely have time to test these.

Dislaimers/Terms of Use

#1: please do not post anything that could get you divorced/fired here. This is the web. It's public. You have to assume that your boss, your wife, googlebot and the FBI are all looking at it. If you want to track potentially embarrassing habits here, (nothing obviously illegal, please) come up with a good pseudonym.

#2: You've heard of "beta" software? Well, this is alpha software. That means it's very possible, perhaps even probable, that one fine morning I will accidentally erase all those lovely little datapoints you've been painstakingly ticking in for months. I will really try not to do this (and I do make nightly backups), but if you can't promise not to kill or sue me if it happens, PLEASE GO AWAY.

#3: I reserve the right to intentionally have the accident mentioned above if you do anything too irritating.