I struggle with change and motivation, same as most people. I'm still very much figuring it out, not writing from some finish line. Everything, including this app, is a work in progress.
I dug the spiral, instantly.
The first time I saw the spiral shape for tracking habits, all of it visible at a glance, it was satisfying in a way I didn't expect. Not a grid, not a checklist, a shape that actually held a whole month at once.
I didn't want to go digital.
So I found an empty spiral template on the internet, printed it out, and took it with me on a road trip. It worked perfectly for thirty days: filling it in by hand with a pencil, one day at a time. Filling it in felt like its own kind of accountability, proof, in my own handwriting.
Thirty days later the sheet was full, but also crinkled, slightly torn, and with a few food stains on it. I printed another for the next 30 days, and after that, another. At some point, I lost the original sheet, and with it, any real sense of how I was doing over the longer run. While there was something almost romantic about paper, it doesn't travel well, doesn't help with continuity, or drawing insights or showing trends.
Craving a single source of truth.
So I looked for an app with a spiral orientation, the thing that pulled me in in the first place. But I couldn't find anything close. That's when the idea to build my own app first came to mind.
At the time, I was using lots of apps for tracking various things for my personal life. Google Tasks for my life to-do list, WHOOP and Strava for health and fitness, Notion for some notetaking and reference content. And another random app for tracking my intermittent fasting. Some consolidation made too much sense.
Not having one source of truth was demotivating on its own, too many places to check. So I asked myself what I actually wanted to track every day, almost like a form of journaling, and set out to build one app that could hold all of it, a source of truth I'd actually keep coming back to.
Not every habit needs the same treatment.
A meditation habit is a yes or no. Water is a number climbing toward a target. Mood isn't done or not done, it's a feeling I wanted to rate, not check off. And even the numbers weren't all the same: steps are good going up, screen time is good going down. Once I stopped forcing all of it into one shape, the tracker finally started to fit how I actually live instead of a form I was filling out.
Some habits are related, too, so I built in a way to nest them together, cardio and stretching under Workout, say, instead of scattering them as five separate entries.
Designed to keep me coming back.
The fun thing about building your own app is that you can change things to exactly how you want them. Not feature requests, just near-instant iteration.
The original name for the app was Habit Streaks, because I was motivated by the idea of streaks, but the longer I used it, the more I noticed: missing a day here and there was perfectly fine in the habit-forming or habit-kicking process, in fact, it was normal. But a broken streak buries that.
I started building out more trend-based visuals and insights. I also changed the miss symbol from a bold red X to a simple dot. No need to emphasize misses. Same information, said more softly.
Allowing for novelty.
I'm the type of person who rearranges the furniture every couple of weeks just to keep things feeling new, and it turns out I like to do the same thing with my habit tracking: change the color, flip the direction, swap the pencil for a marker. A source of truth is no good if you stop opening it, so the app changes right along with me, not because it needed more settings, but because staying interested is part of staying consistent.
Where is this going?
I'll be honest: I don't fully know what I'm building yet. This is a work in progress, a system I'm trying to make fit a brain I don't claim to have figured out. Discipline is hard. What I want is something that sticks, not just through the good stretches, which is the easy part, but through the bad ones. The flat days where the honest feeling is just "who cares." I don't have that solved entirely but I know something, I keep logging by habits and ratings every day in this app.
The accountability runs both ways, too. I'm not deciding what gets built next on my own, I'm building it based on what the people actually using this app tell me they need. If something's missing for you, say so, and it goes on the list.
This app has helped me stay accountable in a way nothing else has. Maybe it's the spiral, maybe it's a consolidated source of truth, maybe it's the novelty factor, or maybe I was just finally ready to hold myself accountable.
If you give this a shot, please let me know how it works for you.
