How to Track Habits: Daily, Weekly or Several Times a Day

This guide explains what habit tracking is, how the four goal types differ, how to choose between them and how to run your first week. It is part of our habits series, which starts with habit tracker widgets and what to check.

What habit tracking is

Habit tracking means recording, each time the chance comes up, whether you did the action. The record can be a paper tick-sheet, a note on your phone or a habit tracker app. Its job is to show the pattern: how often you did it, which days you missed and what those days have in common.

It helps to be exact about what a habit is. In a 2012 article in the British Journal of General Practice, researchers at University College London define habits as “actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance” (Gardner, Lally and Wardle). A habit is not simply something you do often. It is something you do without deciding, because a time, a place or an event sets it off.

A tracker does not create that link. Repeating the action in the same setting does. The tracker is the mirror that tells you whether you are really repeating it. The same authors suggest a daily tick-sheet as one way to follow progress.

Start with one small action and one cue

Before you pick a goal type, pick the action and its cue. The UCL authors give three pieces of advice that are easy to follow:

• Choose a simple action. They note that simpler actions become habitual faster.
• Choose a specific cue. A time or an event you meet consistently, such as after breakfast or during a lunch break.
• Repeat it in the same context. They advise doing the action in the same setting until it becomes automatic.

Write the plan as one sentence that starts with the cue and ends with the action: “After I do this, I will do that”. A few examples:

• After I brush my teeth at night, I read one page.
• When I sit down at my desk, I write my three tasks for the day.
• After I park at work, I walk around the block once.

The cue decides which goal type fits, which is why it comes first.

Four ways to count a habit

A habit can be counted in four main ways. They differ in how often the action is expected and in what counts as a miss.

Once a day

A daily goal is the simplest to understand and the closest to what the research studied. The UCL authors advise choosing a cue you meet every day of the week and doing the action each time you meet it. It suits habits with a cue that never skips a day: waking up, brushing your teeth, making a hot drink, going to bed.

Its weakness is that it is strict. One day of travel or illness breaks the streak, though not the habit. A daily goal works best when the action is small enough to do on your worst day, which is why a “bad day version” of the habit is worth writing down in advance.

Several times a day

Some habits repeat on their own through the day: a glass of water, a stretch away from the screen, a short breathing pause. For these, a single tick a day hides what is going on. A daily count shows how far you got, and it gives each check-in a small purpose.

Set the count low. A target you can reach on an ordinary day, such as three, teaches you more than one you miss every afternoon. Raise it when it starts to feel too easy.

Chosen weekdays

If your cue only appears on some days, a daily goal will count the other days as misses even though there was nothing to attach the habit to. A goal for chosen days of the week fixes that. Practising an instrument after a Tuesday class, preparing lunch on your office days or a weekly stock-up after a Saturday shop are all habits with a natural weekly shape.

The days still need to be honest. Choose the days your cue really happens, not the days you wish it did.

A weekly goal

A weekly goal sets a number, such as three times a week, and leaves the days open. It fits activities where the day varies but the total matters, such as a walk, a writing session or a call to a family member.

The risk is that no particular day owns the habit. With no cue there is nothing to trigger the action, and the week can slip away until Sunday. If you pick a weekly goal, add a soft anchor: “Monday evening is my first try, and two more by Friday.”

How to choose: three questions

Take two minutes with your last fortnight in front of you, calendar or memory, and answer these:

1. When does the cue really happen? If it happens every day, choose a daily goal. If it only happens on set days, choose those weekdays. If it floats, choose a weekly number.
2. Does the action repeat within a day? If it does, count it. Choose a several-times-a-day goal with a small number.
3. What does a bad week look like? If your weeks swing between busy and calm, a weekly number gives you room that a daily rule does not.

A note on what the research does and does not say. In the 2010 study by Lally and colleagues, 96 volunteers each picked one action linked to a daily cue and tried to follow it for 84 days; 82 of them completed the study. The study therefore speaks mostly about daily repetition. The British Psychological Society’s digest of the study adds that the amount of data made it hard to draw clear conclusions about how much consistency a habit needs. So treat a chosen-days or weekly goal as a practical way to fit a habit into your life, not as a proven shortcut to an automatic one.

How to use a habit tracker: your first week

Use this order for your first week. It is a short list, and each step takes a few minutes at most.

1. Write one habit. One action, one cue, in a single sentence.
2. Pick the goal type with the three questions above.
3. Make the action small. If it takes more than a couple of minutes on a normal day, shrink it. You can grow it later.
4. Check in right after you do it. Tick the habit when it is done, not at the end of the day. Ticking afterwards in a batch turns the tracker into a memory test, and you may tick things you did not quite do.
5. Set one reminder at the time of your cue, on the days your cue happens.
6. Pick one weekly review. The same time each week, look at the pattern for two minutes. Which days did you miss? Is there something those days share?
7. Adjust the goal, not yourself. If you keep missing, resize the habit: smaller action, different cue or a different goal type. A goal that does not fit is not a character flaw.

When you miss a day

You will miss days. In the Lally study, missing a single opportunity did not materially change the process: the digest says one missed day had little impact on later gains. Missing many opportunities, even spread out, lowered the level of automaticity reached, as the digest puts it.

The practical rule is to restart at the next opportunity, with a smaller step if needed. We cover this in more detail in what to do when you break a habit streak, and the research behind the timing is in how long it takes to form a habit.

Common mistakes

• Starting with too many habits. Every habit needs its own cue and its own check-in. Start with one, and add a second when the first feels routine; a long list makes it easy to skip every habit on a busy day.
• A goal that does not match the cue. A daily goal for something that only fits on weekdays creates misses that were never your fault.
• Making the action too big. If the plan needs half an hour you do not have, the habit stops on the first busy day.
• Checking in late. Ticking at night for the whole day can make the record less accurate and the action less tied to its cue.
• Letting the number become the point. A streak or a completion rate is a signal about the pattern, not a score about you.
• Never reviewing. A tracker you never look at is a diary. The weekly review is what turns it into a way of improving.

Setting these goals in Spareday

Spareday is our habit tracker. It supports each of the goal types in this guide: once a day, several times a day, on chosen weekdays, or as a weekly goal such as three times a week. You choose a time and the weekdays for each habit’s reminder, so the nudge arrives when your cue does.

A few details that matter for this guide:

• Check in from a widget. Tap a habit on a Home Screen widget to check it in, which makes it easy to tick right after you do it.
• Spare days. Every habit you build has 3 spare days a month, so one rough day does not have to end a streak.
• Fill in a forgotten day. You can fill in any of the last 366 days, and undo it with one tap.
• Statistics. Current and longest streak, completion rate and totals for every habit, plus a whole-year view for your weekly review.

If you would rather keep your data on your own phone, read habit tracker with no account: what you keep and lose before you choose any tracker.