It’s been just over a week into my Habit Tracking Face-off. I started this journey because of the demise of the Full app. Full had been my choice, albeit a new one, for a habit tracking app on my iOS devices. I had migrated from Coach.me to Full, and a very short time later Full became part of the Coach.me universe.
In my last post, I discussed Way of Life. In all fairness, I’m pretty close to settling on Way of Life as my habit tracker, but I decided to continue with my review of Momentum for anyone who is interested.
During the first week of searching for a new app, I attempted to use each of the apps equally, keeping an open mind about which might be the best solution for me. Mike Vardy of Productivityist had mentioned Momentum, so I decided to include it in my initial group. In retrospect, I’m not sure it would have made the cut if he hadn’t mentioned that he was trying it out as his replacement for Full.
One of the keys to my habit tracking is that it has to be easy. I has to make the Staples Easy Button seem difficult. If there is any friction to using the app, I simply won’t track the habits. That would totally defeat the purpose of trying to instill new habits, so I have to have a super easy solution to both data entry and data review.
On the data entry front, Momentum is pretty good. When you open the app, you’re presented with the days of the month. When you’ve completed your habit the day turns green. The theory is based on Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret “Don’t Break the Chain”. The idea is that if you see a chain of successes, you’ll be motivated to keep the chain going.
To record the successful completion of a habit, you have to touch on the day you’re recording for. Then you pick the habit and slide right to record it. That’s pretty simple. It took me quite a while to figure out how to “uncheck” a habit. That is, during testing I wanted to figure out how to lower the number of times that the habit had been recorded. I finally discovered that habit recording is a toggle. You slide right a second time to unrecord the habit.
While the initial display is somewhat useful, it lumps all your habits into one group, so the day turns green if any habit is successfully completed. The day does turn a darker green as more and more habits are completed. Unfortunately, this didn’t show me each of the chains individually on the opening screen. I had hoped that touching on My Habits would show me a visual display of the chain for each habit.
Despite looking at length, I never did discover a way to see a single habit’s chain that I could understand. The only place where you can see a single habit’s chain, is when you’re entering the habit’s completion (as in the screens above). I believe that the green dots signify the current chain, but in all honesty I’m not even sure of that. I even deleted the app and all it’s data and tried to record my back data to test this out, but never quite understood the meaning of the green dots on the data entry screen. I’d think I had it figured out and then would encounter a screen that made no sense to me.
If you select My Habits and then pick a single habit you can see your current streak (chain), your longest streak, and the total number of completions for the habit…all displayed as numbers. I couldn’t find any way within the app to see the streaks visually.
Needless to say, that was frustrating. More importantly, I didn’t want to take a ton of time to figure out the app itself. As I said, if I have to work to hard I’d just end up skipping using the app. That’s exactly what happened with Momentum.
While writing this post, I scoured the Momentum website and discovered in iOS 8, Momentum can be configured to display on the notifications/today screen. This makes it available on the lock screen. From this screen you can enter successful completion of habits, you can undo recording a completion, and you can see the current chain for a habit.
Unfortunately, I’m not a huge fan of the notifications/today screen and don’t use that view very often. While this isn’t directly a problem with Momentum, it would mean that I’d have to change my interaction with my iPhone and it’s apps to use this habit tracking solution. In effect, I’d have to create a new habit to track my other new habits. That’s given me enough reason to not particularly like Momentum.
I was also going to report that you cannot consciously skip a habit without breaking your chain, but I did discover that it’s possible to skip a habit. In the app itself, you slide left to mark a habit as skipped. When you mark it this way, the habit is grayed out on the display. If you’re recording the skip on the notifications/lock screen, hold down on the habit until the box for that day turns gray. This marks the habit as skipped, keeping the chain intact while simultaneously recording that it was proactively skipped.
At no point did I figure out a way to actively tell Momentum that I’d not completed a habit. Apparently all habits are considered not completed until you actively complete or skip them. While that makes perfect sense from a software interface perspective, actively having to mark an X or something similar on a day when I didn’t complete a habit actually proved motivational to me in some of the other apps. While I could just avoid recording anything in Momentum (and the other apps), having to actually fess up and record a failed completion was very important to my instilling new habits in my life.
In all honestly, having to touch on My Habits and then touching on the habit only to be presented with numbers for my streaks was not only disappointing, but counter productive. I found myself having to flip back and forth between the calendar, My Habits, and the days to figure out how I was doing on a habit. The most disappointing thing was that my inability to actually get to sleep by 11:15 was totally masked by the completion of the other habits in Momentum. This totally defeated the purpose of having a habit tracker. Sure, I had a broken chain, but I honestly couldn’t really decipher how bad it was.
Comparing the Momentum display on the left with the Way of Life monthly display from its home screen on the right indicates how much easier the chain is to see in Way of Life.
Current Thoughts
At this point, I’ve given up on Momentum. It’s not doing what I need a habit tracking app to do. Furthermore, there’s a lot of friction for me to even do the simplest recording. As I mentioned in my prior post, I tend to record the completion of my habits the day after they occurred. As soon as I record the successes, skips, and failures I like to see my progress. Frankly, I don’t want to spend a lot of time mulling over the habits. I want them to become automatic, so I need a way to quickly see where I stand. Momentum just doesn’t provide that sort of functionality in a way that resonates with me.
So, from this point forwards, Momentum has move to the proverbial app penalty box and will no longer be part of this face-off. But take my analysis with a grain of salt. It’s a solid app that provides a lot of functionality. It may be the perfect solution for you. At the very least, take a look at this app. It may help you discern what your needs and desires for a habit tracking app are. That, in and of itself, is worthwhile.
It sounds like you should try Streaks. It’s super simple to use and yet versatile enough to track habits. The coolest thing is the complication on the Apple Watch which means you can see how you are progressing over the day.
The main limitation of the Streaks app is that it only tracks six habits, but I have found that this is actually a good thing as it means my habits must be meaningful and I don’t get lost in the weeds of tracking too many things.
Thanks for the article – a good read.