Polar Habits

I’ve used Polar Habits for a good while in 2023, and I like it overall. Like the app’s creator, I find that habit “streaks” can be a double-edged sword and ultimately a detriment. For me, the “streaks” features in other apps make me more consistent initially (when I’m tempted to skip a day, I might do it anyway to avoid breaking that streak), but then I give up as soon as a streak is finally broken. The “momentum” visualizations are a nice alternative. Overall the web app was simple and usable. It doesn’t do much (as I understand it, both by design and because it’s early days), but does it pretty well. I’ve used it for months, then mostly stopped for a few reasons, with some personal factors (life got busy for a while in ways that were not compatible with several of the habits I was tracking) and perhaps some factors related to the app. Now, for some criticism of the app. (Note that this is personal and may not apply to other users.) 1. Out of sight, out of mind. Currently Polar Habits is a web app, and lives as a pinned tab in my web browser. I can easily use my phone and my computer or work at my desk or do chores without seeing or thinking about that app. I tried installing the web app as a standalone mobile app on my phone, but my login state was lost and signing back in required getting a code by email and accessing my email from my phone was a pain, so I didn’t get around to it. It seems you can now add a password to your account, which works better for me (with a password manager, it’s a much faster workflow than getting a code by email every other month), but I haven’t gotten around to switching to that. If a dedicated mobile app is coming sometime in 2024, that could be a welcome improvement. Though other ways to make the app a bit more visible might be nice. (I could set Polar Habits as my home page in my browser, but my current browser doesn’t really do home pages or new tab pages. And I don’t use reminders or push notifications because they frustrate me or stress me out, so I need something visible but which doesn’t interrupt me. :P) 2. I find that the momentum visualization become less informative, or even meaningless, for long-lived habits. In the first 30 days or maybe even 60 days, the curve shows what happened as you tried to get a habit intention off the ground (for instance it could take off in the first ten days if you checked almost every day, then plateau as you falter and start skipping more days than not, then pick back up as you react to seeing the curve plateau or even dip by being more consistent again). But after a while, the momentum visualization gets harder to read and to use as a motivation tool. So as it stands, it's useful for new habits but not much for long-lived ones. 3. The UI mostly shows you 10 or 20 days of history for checked or unchecked days, and maybe a bit more in the momentum graph form. It’s hard to get a sense of how you’ve done over time, especially over a few months or a year. That’s too bad, because sometimes you could derive a sense of accomplishment from a consistent performance, or use a spotty record as a motivator to be more consistent or resume an abandoned habit. Personally, I’d like to see visualizations like dot grids (a la GitHub) or other graphs. Maybe that goes against the “momentum” concept, but by definition momentum is more about the present and fairly recent past, it doesn’t work well for retrospective assessment. So something a bit more retrospective would be nice, as a secondary view (preferably not as an end of year “wrapped” pseudo-event). Finally, not as a criticism but as a suggestion: have you looked into the “implementation intention” concept? The idea is to make a “if-then” plan for when and/or how you want to do something, usually by anchoring it with some other condition that happens regularly (similar to “habit stacking”). I’m wondering if a habit-focused app like Polar Habits could try to (optionally) model things like implementation intentions, using user input, and maybe surface that information back to the user in the UI and/or in reminders. As I said earlier, I personally get frustrated or stressed out by reminders (because they interrupt my focus on another activity, which is sometimes hard to handle when you have ADHD; or sometimes they remind me that I’m failing my own goals, which is a bit stressful). But if a reminder also reminded me of my own concrete plan for doing something, that might help overcome the frustration or stress, because it would (hopefully) remind me of where/when to start. (Yes I do forget when or where to start on the thing, and get decision paralysis from it regularly. I have ADHD. When I’m thinking “I should be doing the thing” I virtually never remember the part about “and I’ve written down the first (few) step(s)”, even if that part happened half an hour earlier, let alone if it happened a day or a week ago.) Anyway, good job so far, and I’ll tag along to see how Polar Habits evolves this year. I’ve resumed using it yesterday (because new year resolutions ^^).