Printable weekly habit tracker

A monthly sheet shows streaks. A weekly one forgives. If the first four days of a month go badly, a monthly sheet stares back with a gap at the start for the next four weeks, and plenty of people stop filling it in around then. On a weekly sheet, a bad Tuesday is gone by Monday.

So use weekly if you are starting something new or restarting after a break. Switch to a monthly grid once a habit holds, because that is when you want to see runs longer than seven days. Our monthly printable tracker is on this site too.

Undated weekly sheets get reused. That sounds thrifty, and it wipes out the only record you had. With the dates printed, a sheet from March is a sheet from March. Keep them in a folder and you have the whole year in order.

Four weeks on one page is the paper-saving option. It fits eight habits and drops the notes line, which is the trade.

What got in the way this week is the most useful thing on the page. Numbers tell you a habit slipped. The line tells you it slipped because Thursday is football, which is a problem with a fix.

Each habit has a Done box: the ticks in its row that week. Divide by the days you meant to do it and you have a weekly rate. Count on the last evening of the week, while you still remember why a box is empty.

A worked example. Three habits over one week: a walk done five times, reading four, water all seven. That is 16 ticks out of 21 boxes, a 76% week. The walk and the water held. Reading dropped on Tuesday and Thursday, and the line at the bottom is where the reason goes.

One empty box does not undo a week. In Lally and colleagues' 2009 study of habit formation, missing a single day did not measurably slow it down.