Changing unhealthy habits or developing new ones takes time and work. All habits involve changing one’s behavior. You must initially invest the effort to achieve a new behavior. However, the human brain is an incredibly powerful computer. It recognizes when you’re making several attempts to achieve something and helps you in doing so. You can monitor and visualize your progress using habit tracker applications, which can also help you stay mindful and aware of possible errors. Many offer free programs, so you may try them without spending any money. In this article, we have mentioned the best free habit tracker apps for your reference.
What Is Habit Tracking?
A tracking technique called habit tracking is used to encourage people to carry out desired actions. Tracking your habits can be as easy as recording patterns and the number of times you’ve finished an activity in a journal. In addition, you can select from various habit-tracking applications that provide features like real-time alerts and personalized data to help you visualize your progress. According to research, if you maintain your new routines frequently, they may become habitual in 10 weeks, and you may even find yourself doing them without noticing.
The below points can help you break old ones and develop new ones:
- Choose an easy routine that can help you in achieving your goals.
- Think and develop certain goals that will improve your overall health.
- Remember to include details like the place and time of the action. Aim for the same time and location every day to maintain consistency.
Benefits Of Habit Tracking
Habit tracking may offer numerous benefits, which include
Encourage Self-reflection and Mindfulness: You can become more completely present by tracking your habits and paying attention to your actions. This allows you to reflect on your actions and the motivations behind them.
Increases Automaticity: Tracking may motivate you to repeat a particular habit. Repetition of practice improves automaticity, according to research. The more you engage in an activity that is helping you create a positive habit, the easier it will be to maintain it. Motivational conflicts decrease as a behavior becomes habitual, strengthening your dedication to the habit you’re developing.
Increases Motivation: Similar to how star charts helped us in elementary school, habit tracking motivates change by encouraging the process of marking success and monitoring progress.
Provides Visual Indications: It might be difficult to form new habits, but it becomes simple when you have reminders to help you stay focused. Keeping track of your actions in a tracker will help you remember when to get something done. A study released by the British Journal of Psychology found that habit formation improved positively in those who connected their behavior to a daily schedule or a particular time.
Factors To Consider While Choosing the Best Habit Tracking App
Many apps are available that can track habits, but they are really difficult to use. For an app to become a habit and replace a wall calendar, it must:
Flexible Habit Tracking Features: Compared to a calendar, a mobile app allows you to track things in greater detail. The best apps should provide you more control over how you track what you want to do and when, including the ability to set targets for how many times a week or month, track bad habits you’re trying to quit, and more.
Have A Mobile App: A smartphone app is necessary, but a desktop or syncing website can be a bonus. Since it’s the one gadget you can depend on to be with you throughout the day, you can check off habits as soon as you complete them.
Quick And Easy To Use: It should be easy to track your habits, taking only a few seconds to use. It doesn’t come into the convenient and beneficial routines if it is complex.
Provide Streaks, Stats, And Other Data: It is advisable to use the quick data analysis feature if you use a smartphone app. The statistics provided by the best habit apps break down several aspects, such as the frequency of each habit, the duration of your current streak, and more.
Updated Features: Because habit monitoring applications are so simple, many are unmaintained and appear to have been created as a side project or simply for fun by developers. You can be sure that habit tracking will be effective for the healthy future. Nothing is more terrible than being forced to use an old but out-of-date app as it gradually stops working.
Best Habit Tracking Apps
Habitica
Habitica is an interesting habit-tracking app that uses gamified features to make users interact more with the application. It provides games, punishments, and rewards to increase productivity and motivation for those using the app. In Habitica, We can create a charcter or avtar. It offers rewards whenever you complete the tasks or habits in your routine. Your avatar may lose some health whenever you fail to complete any to-do list. Most of the features are free, but for other in-app purchases, a subscription is required.
Habitica is available for Android and iOS. It is helpful to track our habits and to-do lists at a fixed frequency, like daily, weekly, or monthly. It provides you with alerts for each task. It also enables us to connect with friends and set tasks and challenges for added motivation and interaction.
Streaks
This app can be useful if you are trying to build habits with repeated tasks for a long time. Stop the bad ones and start a positive lifestyle for anyone trying to build new habits. It is said that the app is well-organized for left-brained thinkers. Streaks help us to complete daily challenges and tasks. Set reminders and frequency of the habits to be done. The interface is easy to use and provides the stats for measuring your progress. The app comprises 78 color themes and 600 task icons, which lets you customize according to your preferences.
Streaks is available for iOS and compatible with the health app and Apple watch to keep you on track. It costs $4.99 per month.
Productive
View your weekly and monthly progress with the Productive habit tracker. It has a wide range of features to track our habits. Productive has great habits built for the morning routine, to-do list, to sleep better, etc.; a great feature in this app is Siri shortcuts for the iOS app. We can check off the tasks by voice command, which is unavailable for Android.
Productive is free, and you can subscribe for in-app purchases for additional features for $3.99.
Habit
Habit Daily Tracker is a very simple and easy-to-use application. The stats are easier to understand than any other app, and it remains one of most people’s favorite apps. You can track your streak and progress directly after setting daily habits and time. Habit is available for iOS, and no Android or web version is available.
It is a free application and has a limited number of habits to choose from. Unlock premium features by paying $14.99 per year, which enables us to use dark mode, cloud storage, more notification options, and save your streaks. It is provided with the widget on the home screen to ensure our habits are on track.
Done
Done is a simple and minimalistic app that shows stats in a horizontal bar to track your habits. The design has bright colors and a user-friendly interface. We can track our goals, build and quit habits, and track them whenever required. Done has a cool feature where you can group similar habits and add notes to think about and write about your habits. It also has basic automation using Apple Health Kit to track your data. You can also export your data as a .csv file, which not all trackers let you do.
Done is available for iOS users only, and the Android app is not yet available. Only three habits can be accessed for the free version, and subscribing for $59.99 lets you use unlimited habits.
Conclusion
In conclusion, habit tracking has been significantly enhanced by the availability of various free apps catering to diverse user needs. Whether aiming for personal development, improved productivity, or better health, the best free habit tracker apps empower users with the right tools to make positive lifestyle changes. By incorporating these user-friendly and accessible apps into daily routines, individuals can start their journey of self-improvement with the support of technology at their fingertips.
