What my habit tracker app says about me
I have been using the Streaks app for many years to encourage me to stick to various daily habits.
I’ll admit upfront that I’m terrible at sticking to many habits, so in some ways the app is my own hall of shame which sometimes shows me how poorly I’ve been keeping to my habits.
The Streaks app lets you create a page of up to six habits you want to track (this can include negative habits such as ‘don’t do something each day’). You can have multiple pages and I am currently tracking 15 different items. Some of these are long standing and some are fairly recent additions.
My habits
As of 26 August 2026, here are the habits that I’ve been tracking along with details of my current %completion rate for 2026 (hopefully these numbers will be higher by the time anyone is reading this):
Floss - 74% completion rate - need to do this twice a day to count as a completion
Eat fruit - 56% - one piece a day will be enough to tick this one off (one of my weakest habits)
Meditate for at least three minutes - 76% - I try to do this for five minutes each morning
Perform morning stretches - 90% - I’m getting old and am trying to gain some (any) suppleness in my body
Exercise - 15% - this is a weekly goal, need to tick it off three times to count
Log stats - 30% - what can be better than logging stats each day around various other things you want to monitor? Well, how about making that stat logging a habit!
Post on Mastodon - 74% - trying to be more social this year, need to post three times a week to make this count
Post on LinkedIn - 91% - like above, but this target is at least once a week
Write blog post - 100% - I used to blog so much but this has proven harder in recent years. So in 2026, I’m aiming for one post per month as a minimum (this is possibly my most successful habit, 13 posts in eight months so far)
Journal - 35% - a relatively new addition, trying to use Apple’s journal app more
Read - 72% - the most obvious one on this list maybe. Even 10 minutes is enough to tick this one off.
Create note in Digital Garden - 100% - I’m currently exploring the concepts of digital gardening. At the current time, I’m just trying to collect notes, at least one each day. It’s this habit that is responsible for writing a note which led to this very blog post!
Listen to music - 20% - this shouldn’t be so hard but I sometimes realise that I’ve not been mindfully listening to music very much. The aim of this recent addition to Streaks app is to listen to at least 15 minutes of music, three times a week. It can be background music but I want to feel that I’m vaguely paying attention to it.
Listen to one complete album - 26% - this has been another new-ish addition to my set of weekly targets.
Play piano - 26% - just need to spend at least 15 minutes twice a week. Note: I don’t really play piano, I just map guitar chords to the piano and vamp around a bit (I don’t have left/right hand independence).
The one habit I never need to track
There is one daily habit which is absent from this list of Streaks habits. Maybe this is because it has become so engrained in my daily routine, I don’t need much of a reminder to do it.
Every day I try to walk at least 10,000 steps. I’ve been using the Pedometer++ app to track this for many years (since 2014). At the time I made the screen grab below, I had hit a 776 day streak!
Does any of this help me?
I often fall off the habit-tracking band wagon, but there are times where I see myself failing to achieve something and that does shame me into doing better.
I also have a daily reminder in my reminders app to look at my progress in Streaks and that now often leads to a flurry of activity between 9-10pm to tick off some items.
Habit tracking is not for everyone, but you might want to give it a try. There are a lot of apps out there to do this, but you can also use a simple analogue approach of crossing off days on a calendar/wallchart. This has become known in some circles as the Seinfeld Strategy…something that Jerry Seinfeld has publicly disowned calling it 'the dumbest non-idea that was not mine'.
