Tech Tip - Streaks - Keep Your Habits on Track

Streaks is an excellent app to help you keep track of small daily habits. I had heard about this application previously, but only just begun to utilize it. I have found that it is easy to use and helps to bring additional awareness to some of the routines I want to establish for myself. January is typically the month most people try to establish new habits and behaviors, but I am willing to bet, now that we are sixty days into the year, most people have given up on those. Streaks is a way to reestablish those small goals and provide support for building them into habits.

The Streaks app works on the principle of doing something everyday and keeping a streak alive. Apple began to popularize this several years ago with the introduction of the Apple Watch and the Health app. People began to want to ‘close their rings’ every day. I believe this is an excellent way to build recurring behaviors, not just related to health, but anything you can track. It is both a way to remind yourself and reward yourself at the same time.

Getting Started

Streaks is easy to set up and get started. It allows you to track up to 24 different habits. I feel as though that many would be overwhelming, but it does give you the option. And since Streaks also allows you to establish different frequency patterns and follow up reminders, you may choose to have some habits that you only complete once a month or only on weekends. It is nice to have that flexibility in the app.

Adding Habits

Beyond typing in the name of a task, you can establish which days you want to complete the tasks, the frequency, and the time. The video above shows how easy it is to set up a new habit you want to track. The screenshot below shows some of the options you can choose from in setting up each routine. You can create custom habits or Streaks will give you many options of common habits people like to track and you can use those to get you started. These are sorted into several categories for you to choose from. One benefit of using some of the preset habits is that many can be set up for automatic tracking when using other apps on your phone or through your Apple Watch.

You can set up multiple pages to have different types of habits grouped together and you can customize the color of your backgrounds for each page. Adding additional habits is as simple as pressing the setting button and tapping the ‘add a task’ button.

As you are setting up each routine you want to track, you can determine whether you want to receive notifications or reminders on how you are doing throughout the course of a day. These can be handy to help reminder you to complete the task you have set for yourself. I use these sparingly, but for example, I receive a reminder on my phone at 10pm each night that I want to be in bed by 10:30pm. This gives me time to wrap up anything I am working on and begin getting ready for bed.

Once you get a few habits you want to keep track of, Streaks makes it easy to see progress as well as provide updates.

Tracking Progress

Streaks, while simple, offers some very powerful features, especially when integrated with the Health app and the Apple Watch. This opens up the ability to have some of your habits tracked automatically. Habits or tasks that cannot be tracked automatically can be ‘completed’ by long pressing on the habit icon. This prevents accidentally marking a habit as completed for the day.

A quick press on the any of the task icons will bring up additional tracking information, including the ability to change the previous day’s completion status.

An additional swipe can provide further information including your current streak and a look at your completion percentage for the last seven or thirty days.

Trends over time

Streaks can show you longer term trends as well how you are doing on each of your habits. By pressing the star button at the lower right corner of the screen, Streaks will allow you to scroll through each task you have established and show you several different statistics about how you are progressing for each.

Use across platforms

Streaks is best used with the iPhone since it is likely you always have that with you. But Streaks does offer an iPad version as well as a version for the Mac. This makes it simple to ensure you can always update your habit tracking and build streaks for long-term behavior changes.

Overall, in the short time I have been using Streaks I have found it very easy to use and extremely helpful in keeping track of the habits I want to have in place. I especially like the fact that I can set up so many of them to be automatically tracked or linked to other devices or applications to ensure I stay up to date. The few manually updated ones then are easy enough to keep track of and check in on a daily basis as part of an end of day routine. Hopefully I won’t need an app to track my habit of updating my habits.

How could you put Streaks to work for you and the routines you want to establish?

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