Chapter 1: My Journey to Habit Tracking

For nearly 27 years, I never intentionally established any habits. While I occasionally expressed a desire to adopt certain activities, they only became part of my routine through time spent on them. I never really embraced goal-setting, progress tracking, or habit monitoring.

Perhaps I was put off by the notion of tracking metrics for my activities; it felt overly formal. However, after reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, I realized the significance of observing our repetitive actions—our habits—to steer my life in the desired direction.

In my quest to document my inaugural set of habits, I naturally turned to Notion.

Section 1.1: The Challenge of Conventional Habit Trackers

I’ve encountered various habit trackers on Notion before, but many of them were cluttered with numerous checkboxes and endless scrolling. While I appreciate a feature-rich Notion workspace, I value clarity and simplicity even more. If a typical user cannot easily navigate a Notion page, it hasn’t been designed as effectively as it could be.

Subsection 1.1.1: The Utility of Buttons

The introduction of Notion’s new button feature has opened up innovative ways to design unique and complex pages within my workspace. Buttons can perform several functions, such as:

• Inserting blocks into your current page.
• Adding pages to a database.
• Editing properties of pages in a database.
• Displaying confirmation windows for actions.
• Opening various pages.

These buttons significantly minimize the number of clicks required to carry out routine actions in Notion.

I utilize buttons to add recurring tasks to my projects, navigate to specific pages, and now, to track my habits. This is facilitated in the initial section of my page: Quick Track.

Chapter 2: Monitoring Progress

The second half of the habit tracker is the Progress section, which features a calendar view. I prefer a weekly layout since it allows me to see a manageable amount of tracking history at once. However, if I need a broader view, accessing the monthly calendar is just a few clicks away. This weekly view keeps the layout neat on both mobile and desktop platforms.

The habits database automatically generates new pages each day, dynamically titled to reflect the current date. With this setup, the page labeled “today” changes to “yesterday” the following day, and becomes a full date thereafter.

Best of all, this process operates seamlessly in the background. There’s no need for extra clicks or actions to initiate a new day. All I need to do is remember my habits and press the buttons to mark them off for the day.

Final Thoughts

Over the years, I’ve experimented with various habit-tracking apps, including Routinery and (Not Boring) Habits. Although these apps are well-crafted, I found it challenging to learn not only the new habit I wanted to adopt but also the app itself.

In my view, Notion holds a distinct advantage in habit tracking: rather than requiring me to visit a separate habit tracker, it integrates directly into my existing dashboards and workflows.

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