I’m a week into my Habit Tracking Faceoff. Last week, I discussed why I was being forced to find a solution to replace Full. I’m still upset about that turn of events. Honestly, I don’t blame the folks at Coach.me or Lemonly at all, but I’m still disappointed.

After writing last week’s post, I decided that I wanted to include Full in the comparison. So Full has been added to the faceoff with Way of Life, Momentum, and Coach.me.

During this first week of the face off I planned to use each of the apps equally, and trying to keep an open mind as to which was the best solution for me. My goal is to instill new habits in my life. I’m painfully aware that if I have to struggle with an app I’m going to stop using it. That would lead to a doubly disappointing result since I not only wouldn’t be using the app…I’d also not be tracking the habits that I was trying to attain.

Midweek I was so frustrated with the app comparison that I came this close to calling the entire project off. I didn’t see the point in comparing the apps when none of them were really doing what I wanted. I didn’t call the project off though. I’m chalking it up to Mike Vardy from Productivityist.com and  his regular comments about Green Lantern and Willpower. While that was only part of the reason, I want to lay the blame at somebody’s feet…and Mike’s a great target! If you don’t know the backstory, Will is the power that the Green Lantern Corps harnesses to protect the universe. That’s a pretty minimalist description, but it’s what I’ve got.

On a daily basis, the recording of your habits is only going to take a few seconds. At least it should. Anything longer and I know that I wouldn’t do the recording. It’s just the way I am…too much friction to accomplish a task and I’ll say “screw it” and not do it. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s just being judicious with my time. If recording my habits is supposed to lead me to a better me, then the actual recording has to be easy.

I tend to record my habit results the day after they were accomplished. I’m tracking three habits Drinking Water, Exercising, and Sleep by 11:15. So, early in the morning I record the results from the prior day. The post-recording of habits is very important to me, so I put a lot of weight on the ability to change to a different day and record the habits. I also managed to not record my habits for a couple of days in a row, so it was even more important that I could record on multiple days easily. I’m working hard to instill the meta-habit of recording my habits daily…but it seemed weird to add a habit to record habits. Plus, the free versions of the apps only allow for recording three habits. I’m tracking Exercising, Drinking Water, and Sleep by 11:15. Those are important enough to me that I decided I would just have to remember to do the habit logging some other way.

Way of Life

When you open up Way of Life, you’re presented with a screen that summarizes overall weekly progress as well as the results for each habit. The green bars indicate days where you achieved your habit and the red bars indicate the days where you didn’t achieve your habit. The gray bars indicate those days where you skipped your habit. I’m using the “skipped” status for days where I intentionally opted to not achieve the habit. For my exercising habit, these are my scheduled rest days. For my sleep by 11:15 habit, these are the days that I opted to not go to sleep at 11:15 on purpose. This past week I was reading Becoming Steve Jobs. It’s borrowed from the library, so I have a fixed return date, plus the book is really good. I opted to stay up a little later each night reading, but made a conscious decision at 11:15 whether to do that or not. Additionally, this was Memorial Day weekend, so being asleep by 11:15 wasn’t as big a deal, since I didn’t need to arise so early the next morning. In retrospect, these conscious decisions had an underlying component…frankly, a lack of willpower. I was making decisions to not engage in a habit that I’d said I wanted to adopt. More about this later. The important thing now is that Way of Life provided a way to differentiate whether I simply failed at engaging in a habit or whether I made a conscious decision to skip the habit. It turns out that’s a very important distinction to me.

To record your habit’s accomplishment you touch on the habit’s name. This brings up a selection menu containing Erase, Yes, No, and Skip. I didn’t select erase for the better part of the week because I didn’t want to erase the habit. I finally discovered that Erase simply closes the menu if you are on a day with no logged result. If you have selected a day that has a result, Erase removes that result. This was helpful on days when I recorded the wrong result, although simply touching on the other options replaced the incorrect result as well.

To select the prior day, touch the results bar for one of the habits. This enlarges the triangle and moves it to the day you’ve selected. The day description at the top of the screen changes as well. You can then either touch the results bar again to select a different day or use the arrows on either side of the top line of the screen to pick the day you want. As I mentioned before, since I’m recording the results of these habits the day after they were accomplished, this ability to switch to a different day was pretty slick. Being able to jump from day to day on the same screen was a huge plus to Way of Life as a habit tracking solution.

Once you’ve picked a day, changing to a different habit leaves that day selected. This was really convenient when I wanted to go back and record from a couple days in the past.

It seems almost silly that I wrote all that about how to record a habit. In reality, you touch on the habit, pick the status you want to record, and you’re done with it. That’s it. Recording habits from yesterday takes an extra touch. Nothing too involved, nothing too difficult.

The opening screen of Way of Life also presents you with a quick view of where you stand with each of your habits. In the screenshots above you can tell that I did a great job exercising but pretty much blew off my Sleep by 11:15 habit. Not accomplishing a habit the first day and skipping it intentionally four of the next five days does not indicate that I was serious about instilling that habit in my life at all.

To see how you did the prior week, swipe right. If you want to see how you’ve done for multiple weeks, there are two ways to do this. Touching the eye in the upper righthand corner of the screen lets you select the monthly view on the opening screen. This expands the number of boxes shown on the results to include an entire month instead of a week. I found myself in this view quite a bit. I’m still on the fence as to whether I like the weekly or the monthly view better. At this point, I don’t have very much data, so there isn’t all the much difference. This is an area that I’m going to continue to assess, but it’s nice to know that two touches allows me to swap the views.

The second way to view your results revolves around trends in Way of Life. Touching the Trend button on the bottom of the screen displays a summary of all your habits, by week, in a stacked chart. It took me a while to get used to the idea that the week’s number is at the bottom of the chart. While I realize that screen real estates at a premium, it would be more useful to me if this number was an actual date. Of course, that will open up the firestorm of whether the date should be the first day of the week or the last day of the week. The default view for the habit results is for 6 weeks. This can be changed by clicking on the down arrow next to the week number (next to the 22 in the screenshots). There are plenty of other options for display, but those are outside the scope of this week’s review.

Touching on a single habit presents the results for just that habit. In the default view, the Yes, No, and Skipped results are stacked on top of each other. I really liked this, since it gave me a week in review but also broke down my successes, failures, and intentional skips.

As a side note, I’m sure that using the term failures goes against something in the habit building world, but when I looked at my actual results that’s exactly the word that came to mind. Not only that, failing at a habit is motivational to me. It’s the kick in the backside that I need, so I’m going against the grain here and using failed to describe those times that I didn’t engage in the habit that I wanted to unintentionally.

Current Thoughts

I’m leaning very heavily towards making Way of Life my habit tracking app. I’m actually struggling to keep an open mind about the other apps. I had intended to write a true face-off post about my thoughts regarding each of the apps after a week’s usage, but the only one that I wanted to write was the review of Way of Life. Now that I’ve got this post done, I’m going to write about my experience with the other three, so you have that to look forward to. At least I hope you’re looking forward to it.

During this process, I’ve become highly aware that selecting a habit tracking app is a very personal decision. Everyone is looking for something a bit different. In my case, I’m looking for quick data entry and quick results review. I don’t really need to spend a lot of time analyzing my results. A quick glance is enough to let me determine if I’m on track or if I need to change course.

For example, a quick review of my Sleep by 11:15 habit helped me realize that I didn’t take this habit seriously. That led me to thinking about why I had set the habit, whether it needed to be changed to a different time, and quite honestly whether I wanted to track it or not. I was forced to really think about why I had set that habit. It wasn’t arbitrary in any way. For most of my life, I’ve been a night owl. I can easily stay up until the wee hours of the morning doing stuff. I actually enjoy the quiet that settles in at night like a warm blanket. Most of family would wind down and go to sleep, and there I would be in my office, doing stuff. For many years the stuff was productive. My mind would be working throughout the day, and a certain clarity would descend as the clocked ticked onwards.

But lately that clarity hasn’t been there. Sure, I’m getting older, but that’s only part of the story. Our family life has changed. With the addition of Hectic Grandson to my routine, I’m chasing a toddler around for the better part of the day. I’m juggling the lives of eleven people, running our house, trying to run a blog, and contemplating the future of five or six other websites. I do independent consulting for a couple electronic health record companies. I make hundreds, if not thousands of decisions every day. Frankly, by the wee hours of the morning I’m tired. Physically and mentally tired. And my late night forays onto the Web have consisted of a lot more consumption of drivel than productive work.

When I came to that realization, I understood that I’m wasting my nights away. I’m not really productive anymore…I’m just burning the candle. Then I have difficulty getting up the next morning. During the school year, it’s hard to arise, but I’ve got to get the kids ready, breakfasts made, and everybody off to school. Yet as Bob Dylan said, “The time’s they are a changin’ “. We will have one high schooler and one middle schooler at home next year. I’ll have three in college in the Fall. Hectic Grandson is getting more and more independent. And Summer is currently upon us. I don’t have to really be up at any specific time in the morning. I could sleep in and keep my days shifted towards the night. But why? Seriously, why?

If I stay shifted towards the night I’m not all that productive. I’ve discovered that the morning is vastly productive time for me. I can write in the quiet of the morning without interruption. My mind is fresh. My body doesn’t ache quite so much. And thoughts seem to flow. Plus coffee tastes better in the early morning than late at night. Really, it does!

So the Sleep by 11:15 habit makes sense. The upshot is when I go to be earlier I can get up in the morning more easily. I can take advantage of the early morning hours to get more work done on my blog and my other projects. As an inveterate night owl, I could stay up well past midnight every night. I’d still get some work done, but I don’t feel like that work is my best work. When I start the day off early, the quiet peacefulness and clear mind help me do a better work. So I’m sticking with the Sleep by 11:15 habit.

The Way of Life habit tracking app helped me figure all that out…so in my book that’s a win.