Habits

Open a client, pick Tracking, then Habits under Activity. This panel answers one question: is this person actually doing the small daily things you agreed on, and if not, when do they stop.

The window

The chips beside the title set what everything on the screen covers: Month, 30 d, 90 d, 6 mo and All. It opens on 30 days. Month means the calendar month so far, which is the one to pick when the question is “how did August go” rather than “how have they been lately”.

The quiet line beside the chips counts the habit logs inside that window.

The four tiles

• Overall completion is every habit log in the window, done against total. The tile carries the window in its label so the figure is never read against the wrong stretch of time.
• Best and Worst are named, not asserted: each one is a habit, with its own completion behind it. On a client with a single habit there is no worst tile figure, because there is nothing to be worse than.
• Streak counts consecutive days back from today.

Two rules worth knowing

A day with nothing logged ends a streak. It does not extend it and it does not quietly get skipped. An unbroken run has to be a run of days the client actually did something, otherwise a client who logs nothing for a fortnight would keep the streak they had before it.

Today is the exception. Until the day is over, a today with nothing on it yet is skipped rather than counted as a break, so a streak does not collapse at nine in the morning because the client has not opened the app.

A day at zero looks different from a day never logged. On the strip, a day the client logged and missed everything draws a hairline at the bottom of its track. A day with nothing recorded draws an empty track. The distinction matters more than it sounds: recording nothing is not the same as recording a failure, and a habit you added on Wednesday was not missed on Monday. Nothing counts as a miss anywhere on this screen unless there is a log to say so.

The daily strip, and fixing a day

Daily completion draws one cell per day, oldest on the left and today on the right. The strip follows your window rather than fixing at 30 days, and stops at 60 cells, because below about six pixels a cell stops being something you can aim at. Hover any cell for its date and how many habits were done that day.

Click a cell to open that day’s habit log. This is the only place on the screen that reaches a single day, and it is what “the client forgot to tick Tuesday” needs: you can fill in or correct what was recorded, on their behalf, without leaving the panel.

The weekday pattern

Week pattern is the same logs split by day of week, Monday to Sunday, as a percentage each.

This is the reason to open the panel rather than reading the figure on the rail. A single 76% says a client is mostly doing the work. The same 76% split by weekday says they do it every day except Saturday, and that is a conversation you can actually have.

By habit

By habit lists every habit the client has logged in the window, best completion first, each with its own bar, the days done against days logged, and the percentage. It is where you look before changing what you have asked of somebody: dropping the habit at 41% is usually better coaching than repeating yourself about it.

With nothing logged in the window the cards say so plainly, and a client who has never been given a habit reads No habits assigned yet.

Habit settings

Habit settings, at the top right, is a per-client dialog holding two things:

• whether this client is sent reminders to log their daily habits;
• which habit-tracking form this client gets, overriding your app default. Leave it empty and they get the default.

It is the habits twin of Tracking settings on the check-in panels. Both are agreements with the one client in front of you, unlike Configure, which is your own preference about what a screen draws and applies to every client you open. See The Tracking tab.