What is a habit? #
A habit is a recurring behaviour or action a user aims to develop, maintain, or improve over time. Habits can be positive (e.g., exercising daily, reading before bed) or negative (e.g., reducing screen time, cutting back on sugar), and tracking them helps reinforce consistency and accountability.
By consistently tracking habits, users can gradually integrate positive behaviours into their routines and work towards long-term personal growth and self-improvement.
Tracking habit adoption #
A habit in this context is a specific behaviour that the user is required to fulfil at some set interval. For example: drinking three glasses of a water each day.
To track habit adoption, the behavioural event needs to be recorded, and the recording is referred to as ‘habit tracking’. The Good Day app includes facilities for the user to record when a habit action is completed. This tracking can be completed when the event occurs or retrospectively.
Each time a user completes a habit behavioural event target for that period instance, this is defined as a ‘pass’. If the target is not reached, then this is regarded as a ‘fail’. For example, if the user does drink 3 glasses of water on a given day this is set as a ‘pass’.
A habit is defined with a start/finish date range, and an accompanying habit tracking pass assessment period. By default, the assessment period is set to 66 days, as this is the elapsed time over which research has shown that a habit needs to be repeated before it becomes part of the user’s normal behaviour.
Each habit will have an adoption pass percentage. This is the target pass rate that a user is set over the assessment period. For instance, if the user has a habit of “drink 3 glasses of water every day”, with an assessment period of 66-days, and an adoption rate of 90%, then they will have to complete/pass the habit 60 times over the 66-day assessment period for them to be judged successful
Habit attributes #
In Good Day a habit has a number of key attributes:
- Title: This is a short descriptive title
- Description: A longer narrative description, in which the purpose and motivations for the change may be recorded.
- Start When the habit will start to be tracked.
- Finish: When the habit tracking will finish.
- State: The life cycle state of the habit
- Purpose: The positive or negative motivation for the habit.
- Folder: whether the habit is linked to a folder
- Category: Whether the habit is linked to a category
- Trigger: the time of day when the habit would normally be triggered
- Weighting: the relative importance of the habit compared to other habits
- Tags: one of more free form tag names that can be applied to the habit.
- Frequency: the time period at which tracking will occur, either daily, weekly, or monthly
- Completion by: defines the method by which a habit will be tracked and recorded as ‘passed’ over the tracking period instance
- Adoption pass %: The target percentage of completion passes over the declared assessment cycle
- Assessment period: the rolling period over which tracking performance will be measured.