The short answer
- Put it where the habit happens, not where your nice stationery lives.
- One habit per page, or three at the very most. A full page of boxes invites a fresh start every fortnight.
- A mark is enough: a tick, a dot, a letter. Save the colour coding for a habit that already has a month behind it.
- Undated pages beat dated ones, because a missed month does not become waste.
- Look at it daily, fill it in weekly. Two different actions, and the second is the one people drop.
Set it up in fifteen minutes
- Write the habit as an action, not an outcome: walk after lunch, not get fit.
- Choose the smallest version that still counts on a bad day.
- Decide the moment it happens - after which thing you already do - and write that beside the habit.
- Print one undated page and put it where the action actually occurs.
- Fill in the first week retroactively tonight, so the page is not blank when you start.
Paper or app: how to tell which you are
Apps win when the habit happens at a screen and you want a reminder. Paper wins when the habit happens away from screens, or when the notifications have become something you swipe away without reading them.
The honest test takes a week. Keep whatever you use now, and count the days you actually looked at it. If the number is small, the medium is wrong, and that is a much easier thing to change than your character.
- If you already open a spreadsheet every morning, track it there. Paper would only add a step.
- If you forget by Tuesday, a page on the wall beats a reminder you have muted.
- Do not run both at once for the same habit. One of them will quietly become the version you believe, and it will not be the wall.
The monthly review, which is the part that keeps it alive
- Once a month, count the marks and write one sentence about what made the good weeks good.
- If a habit has fewer than half its marks, shrink it rather than quitting it.
- Ask two questions and no more: what helped, and what got in the way.
- Start a fresh page each month if the printed one is full. A clean page is a normal event, not a reset of your worth.
The free tool for this
There is no calculator that answers this one honestly, so here is the free set: eight calculators for rates, quotes, invoices, splits, prices and fees. They run in the page and send nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
Habit Ledger is an undated 52-week printable with a 30-day marking block and a monthly review that asks two questions, in A4, Letter and an ink-saving version. Habit Ledger is $9. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
Should I track more than one habit?
Three is the usual honest maximum on paper, and most people do better with one. Add the second only once the first has four steady weeks behind it.
What do I do about a missed day?
Leave the box empty and carry on. Breaking a streak is the main reason people abandon a tracker, and the streak itself was the invention.
Read next
How to build a habit without another app, How long does it take to build a habit, really.