Keep track of activities with Habbits for Android

Most people have goals they would like to achieve. Lose some weight, gain muscle, learn a language, travel to Australia or Mars.

The difficult thing is not to come up with those goals but to walk the walk.

Most goals are achieved by working on them on a regular basis. If you want to lose weight for instance, you cannot just eat nothing on a day but give up on the idea on the next and eat a super-sized pizza.

Habbits is a free application for Android that tries to motivate you in a special way. The main idea behind the program is to link activities to create chains.

If you learn Japanese every day for example you create a chain for every day that you did learn the language. The chain breaks when you don't learn and you start all over again building it the next day.

Habbits can be used for nearly anything that you do regularly. It does not necessarily have to be self-improvement either. Create a new habit to shop for groceries once a week, read a short story to your children before they go to bed, or a night's out with friends.

It is easy to create new habits in the application. All you need to do is select a name and frequency for the habit. The frequency can be fixed, e.g. twice a week on Monday and Thursday, or flexible. If you select flexible, you specify the number of times per week, month or year.

Each created habit is displayed in the main interface afterwards. You can tap once on a date to check it. This acts as indication that you completed the activity on that day.

A double-tap marks it as red which will break the chain and start a new chain on the next day you complete the activity.

Activities can be filtered on the main screen which can be useful if you have created quite a few. Filters are available for each category and for the current day.

You find several interesting options in the settings. You can configure the program to display the longest streak to you, change the week start day, or enable "not-done" auto-checking if an activity has not been checked on a given day.

Closing Words

It can be motivating to see a chain grow over time and the desire to not break the change can be enough to push you into pursuing activities on a day that you may not have otherwise.

With that said, Habbits is not a drill instructor, teacher or parent who make sure that you do something on a given day.

It should work well for people who are motivated enough to do something on their own but need an extra push every know and then to stay motivated.