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Sometime ago, I wrote about Coach.me here, here, and here. It was my habit tracking app of choice at the time, and I foresaw a bright future where I would decide on a habit to add to my repertoire, add it to the Coach.me app, and I then move towards incorporating that habit into my daily routine through regular measurement.

For many reasons, I wasn’t using Coach.me consistently. The community aspect had sounded fantastic, but I never really got into it. The idea of hiring a coach to help me with various habits was intriguing, but the costs weren’t part of our budget, so I never jumped on that bandwagon. Then I ran into the issue that all habits are present every day. In my world, I have monthly, weekly, and daily habits. Coach.me was only really working for the daily habits, and I had to create a reminder in my task manager to update my Coach.me or I would forget. In short, things weren’t working as planned.

I dragged my feet for a while, simply giving up on using a habit tracker. Eventually I decided that was a bad plan, and began the search for a replacement for Coach.me. I discover the Full app and went all in last week. I loved the presentation of the results, the differentiation between monthly, weekly, and daily habits, and many other features. I was enamored with this new solution. That’s not odd for a new solution that I’ve found, so I figured I would give it through the rest of the month before I made any permanent decisions.

Unfortunately, less than 24 hours later the news hit that the Full App had been purchased by the folks at Coach.me. The first indication was the splash screen change in the Full App at login, recommending that you download and try out Coach.me.

Quite honestly, I was devastated. I had found a solution that I liked and now was being directed back to the solution that I’d abandoned.

Fortunately, I was still somewhat in the mode of searching for a new solution, so I dug back into iTunes reviews and Google searches and discovered Way of Life. I whined on my Twitter timeline that I was so disappointed about the demise of Full (at least that’s the way I saw it) and commented that I was trying out Way of Life. A bit later I was surprised by a tweet from Tony Stubblebine, the founder of Coach.me asking what my primary reason for leaving Coach.me was. That impressed me. He’s got plenty of things to do, so his direct interaction with me was impressive. I did my best to outline my frustration with the lack of monthly/weekly/daily separation, but 140 characters isn’t much space to define that kind of issue. A while later Mike Vardy of Productivityist, the original recommender of The Full App mentioned that I ought to checkout Momentum.

I’ve downloaded and installed both Way of Life and Momentum. The free version of each app allows you to track three habits, so I’m tracking Sleep by 11:15, Exercising, and Drinking Water in both apps. I’m also tracking those same three habits in Coach.me. The idea is that I’ll see which solution works best for me. I’m going to continue the test until the end of May and then assess where I want to go from there.

Both Way of Life and Momentum cost $4.99 for their premium versions, so the investment for either one isn’t too great…in terms of dollars. The bigger investment will revolve around whether I really use the app. If I don’t use it, the $5 will be wasted money.

So here we go…testing three solutions to my habit tracking for the next two weeks or so.