Tracking habits: daily check-in vs weekly review

Daily tracking tells you whether you did the thing today. Weekly review tells you whether the system is working. Without the weekly review, you are just collecting checkmarks.

The five-minute weekly review

Same time each week — Sunday evening or Monday morning works for most people. Open the tracker. Look at the last 7 days for each habit. Ask:

1. Did I do this at least 5 of 7 days? If yes, leave it alone.
2. Did I do it 2–4 days? Something is wrong with the design — see below.
3. Did I do it 0–1 days? Pause it or shrink it.

The four design knobs

If a habit is failing, the fix is almost always one of four things:

• Size — make the daily target smaller.
• Time — move the trigger to a part of the day that actually has space.
• Place — move the cue closer to where the habit happens.
• Frequency — go from daily to 4× a week. Done 4× a week beats not done 7× a week.

Don’t add new habits during a review

The temptation is to look at a green week and immediately add three new habits. Resist. Add at most one new habit per fortnight, and only when the existing ones are running on autopilot.

Look at the trend, not the day

A single bad day means almost nothing. A bad week is interesting. A bad month means the system is wrong. Most people obsess over the day and miss the trend. Reverse it.

Write down one sentence

At the end of the review, write one sentence about what changed and what you’re trying next week. Six months of those sentences is the most useful piece of personal data you will ever have.