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BeHabitual

A personal productivity tracker that measures days, not hours

Most productivity tracking measures the wrong thing. Hours logged, apps used, keys pressed, none of which distinguish a good day from a busy one. This measures whether the handful of things that make a day count actually happened.

Start trackingSee what is free

Free while in early access. No card, and nothing to install.

Good for

  • Measuring output you chose in advance rather than activity you happened to generate
  • People who suspect their busy weeks and their productive weeks are different weeks
  • Anyone who wants a number they cannot game by leaving a document open
  • Tracking yourself, on purpose, for your own reasons

Not for

  • Monitoring employees, which this will not be built for
  • Automatic time tracking, since every entry is manual
  • Screen time or app usage, which is not collected
  • Billable hours and invoicing

Activity is not output

A tracker that watches your screen can tell you that you spent six hours in a code editor. It cannot tell you whether any of it mattered, and it will happily award a perfect score to a day spent rewriting something that did not need rewriting.

The alternative is unfashionable and works better: decide in advance what a productive day contains, then record whether those things happened. It takes ten seconds a day and it cannot be gamed by leaving a window open, because you are the one deciding, and you know when you are lying.

The two rates, and why one number is not enough

There are two completion figures on the dashboard and they answer different questions. Completion measures you against the goals you set. Consistency measures you against the days that have actually happened so far this month.

The gap between them is the interesting part. A high completion rate with low consistency usually means you set goals that were too easy. The reverse means you are doing the work most days and still missing targets you picked while feeling ambitious, which is a goal-setting problem and not an effort problem.

Reading a month without lying to yourself

The first instinct at the end of a month is to look at the headline percentage and feel something about it. That number is close to useless on its own. Three other views are worth more.

  1. The weekday breakdown, which converts "I am bad at this" into "Thursdays are the problem"
  2. The longest unbroken run, which tells you the routine is achievable because you already achieved it
  3. The per-habit ranking, which usually shows one item quietly dragging the average down while the rest are fine

Sleep and mood, with a warning attached

You can optionally log two numbers a day, hours slept and how the day felt out of ten, and see them plotted across the month next to your completions.

Here is the honest caveat, and it matters. One person's month cannot establish cause. If your mood and your output move together, that is a pattern worth noticing and it is not evidence that one produced the other. A hard week at work moves both at once. Treat it as a prompt to pay attention, never as a result.

Why there is no surveillance here

No screen time, no app usage, no keystrokes, no location. Not because collecting it is hard, but because a productivity tool that watches you changes what you do in front of it, and the number stops describing your work and starts describing your performance of work.

The cost of this position is real: nothing is automatic, and if you do not open the page for four days you have four days of gaps to fill from memory. That is the trade, and it is the right one.

Step by step

How to track your own productivity

Measure output you chose in advance, in about ten seconds a day.

  1. 01

    Define what a productive day contains

    Pick three or four things that, if they happened, would make you call the day a good one. Be specific enough that you can answer yes or no at 6pm.

  2. 02

    Set a monthly target for each

    Deep work five days a week is roughly 21 days a month. Setting it to 30 guarantees you miss, and a target you always miss stops carrying information.

  3. 03

    Record honestly, including the bad days

    The month is only worth reading if the zeros are in it. A grid you curate is a grid that tells you what you already believe.

  4. 04

    Review the weekday pattern, not the total

    Totals produce feelings. Patterns produce changes you can actually make, usually to a schedule rather than to your character.

Questions people ask

Does this track my screen time or app usage?
No. Nothing is collected automatically. Every entry is a box you clicked yourself, and no screen time, app usage, keystroke, or location data is recorded at any point.
Can I use this to monitor my team?
No. Everything is scoped to a single personal account with no sharing or manager view, and employee monitoring is not a direction this is being built in.
How do you measure productivity?
By whether the things you decided were important actually happened, on how many days. Completion measures you against your own goals, consistency against the days that have elapsed. Neither tries to score the quality of the work.
Is manual tracking not less accurate than automatic?
It is less complete and more accurate. Automatic tracking captures everything and understands none of it. A person deciding whether the day counted knows things no screen-time log can see.
What if I forget to log for a few days?
Fill them in from memory, which is fine for a few days and unreliable past a week. This is the real cost of manual tracking and there is no way around it here.

Read next

Going deeper

Longer pieces on the parts of this that people get wrong.

Start with three habits and one month

You will know by the end of it whether this is the tracker that sticks. That is a shorter test than most things you have tried.

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