I’m just over two weeks into my Habit Tracking Face-off and my thoughts are becoming clearer about what I want in a habit tracking app. While I started this journey because of the demise of the Full app I’ve realized that all things happen for a reason. In retrospect, Full wasn’t going to do what I really needed…so the change in Full’s status gave me the impetus to look at other solutions. It turns out this is exactly what I needed to do.
In my last post, I discussed Momentum and prior to that I reviewed Way of Life. In all fairness, I’m pretty close to settling on Way of Life as my habit tracker, but I decided to complete the reviews of all the habit trackers. These reviews may help you make a decision as to whether you want to track your habits, and if so, what solution might work best for you.
Once upon a time, eleven month ago I discovered the Lift app on my iPhone. It was a simple habit tracker that allowed me to set the habits that I wanted to promote, track my progress on when I accomplished those habits, and quickly see where I was succeeding and where I wasn’t. At the start of 2015, I wrote a blog post about how I was using Lift…which had just been renamed Coach.me.
Over the next few months, I continued to use Coach.me as both an app and at their website, but I slowly became more frustrated with each passing day. As I’ve written before, I want a simple solution that allows me to set my habits quickly, track them even more quickly, and review them in just a few seconds. I don’t need a lot of outside input. At this point I don’t need (or at least have avoided) an outside coach, and I don’t need a community of folks I don’t know sending me props.
But Coach.me was starting to force those things into my world. As the name implies, they are now focusing on the coaching aspect. It’s a revenue stream, and a huge market. In fact, the one reason that I’ve kept the app around is that I’ve considered entering the coaching world…and Coach.me might be a way to do that.
But from a daily perspective, Coach.me just wasn’t doing it for me. In fact, I found myself recording fewer and fewer habits. And more importantly, I didn’t record on a daily basis. Frankly, near the end I was barely recording on a weekly basis…and hardly ever reviewing my results. This defeated the purpose for a habit tracker for me.
So I made the decision to jump to Full. The next day they were part of Coach.me and I was devastated. So my journey to find another habit tracker had begun.
Coach.me certainly has a place in the world of habit acquisition. I’m sure there are lots of people who would benefit from a coach to help them stay on track with new habits. I had a personal trainer for two months. I got the sessions as a Christmas gift, and I’ll readily admit that I learned more about fitness and working out in those two months than I have over any other time period in my life. I really liked him, and when we see each other socially we have a lot to talk about. But I didn’t really like having to go to a gym. I didn’t feel like the value-added that he provided was worth the money. And I don’t really feel like I should need somebody to tell me how to work out. I certainly don’t need a cheerleader when I’m working out. So I’m firmly entrenched outside the target market for Coach.me.
As far as the app is concerned, it’s gone through a couple of revisions since January. You can quickly swipe right to record the successful completion of a habit. While it takes two touches to unrecord a habit, it’s not that difficult to do. It takes a couple of taps to review your overall progress for a habit. Oddly, they use orange to represent a streak and green to record when a habit was completed successfully. This makes the displays a bit confusing to me. Orange isn’t a color that I associate with success…it’s just a color. I prefer green for success and red for failure. Of course, all the habit tracking gurus are flipping out because I said the F-word. We’re not supposed to talk about failure. I guess it’s supposed to be success-challenged or something. But newsflash, I live in the real world where we succeed and we fail. I learn as much (if not more) from my failures than I do from my successes.
It is convenient that you can see your habit results as both frequency per week and frequency per month simultaneously on the same screen. It was a bit weird to me that the habit itself is in a light gray on the top of the screen. While writing this post I got confused as to which habit’s results I was looking at a couple of times. That’s just an aesthetic issue, but it’s one that bothered me.
You do get a lot of feedback using the app. You get sparkly pop-ups when you have recorded your habits lots of times. You get a hand to high-five when you meet certain criteria. Basically, you get a bunch of feedback that didn’t improve my interactions with the app, and I found distracting. As I said, I don’t need a cheerleader…but the Coach.me app worked really hard to cheer me on despite my curmudgeonly old self.
So, on the data entry front Coach.me is relatively easy. It took me a while to discover that I could swipe right to record a habit. Until you discover that, it appears that you have to touch on a habit, touch on the gigantic checkmark to record the habit, and then on the tiny X to close the screen. That was almost a deal-breaker with the app prior to the other issues I encountered.
Coach.me is another app that uses the “Don’t Break the Chain” system attributed to Jerry Seinfeld as his main productivity secret. The idea is that if you see a chain of successes, you’ll be motivated to keep the chain going. The display is a bit wonky to me though, as the chains aren’t exceedingly obvious the way they are shown.
As of the version that I’m using, there is no way to record that you consciously skipped a habit. That is, if I’m exercising 5 days a week, there are going to be two days a week when I’m taking a recovery day. Those are really breaks in the chain, they’re consciously decided upon days when I’m not exercising. In Coach.me they appear as breaks in the chain.
Despite searching, I couldn’t find a way to mark a habit as not-completed. It appears that Coach.me assumes a habit is not completed until you actively complete it. I prefer to mark my habits as either successful, skipped, or failed. That’s a personal preference, but habit tracking is a very personal affair, so it’s an important preference.
Current Thoughts
At this point, I’ve given up on Coach.me. It’s not doing what I need a habit tracking app to do. Furthermore, there’s too much friction for me. While habit recording is sufficiently easy, reviewing the status of my successes and failures became too onerous and I simply didn’t do it. Another “feature” of Coach.me is a constant stream of e-mails giving you accolades for successful completion of a habit as well as noting how long your current chain/streak is. Coupled with the multiple daily e-mails advertising coaching services, I was overwhelmed. I know that you can change the settings in the app to reduce the number of cheerleading e-mails and I can unsubscribed to the coaching ads…but that seemed like a lot of work for an app that I was barely using. And definitely not using effectively.
Despite being in a somewhat whiney mode about Coach.me, I can see use-cases where it might be advantageous for some users. I’m just not one of them. At least not at this moment. I have considered using Coach.me to aid in my writing habit, or my home-managment habit, or other similar situations where I might need a nag…erm, Coach. For now, I’m removing Coach.me from my iPhone and iPad and will create a filter to send the incoming avalanche of e-mails directly into a folder in my Google Mail for later review.
