Only One Habit

​Very specifically, you can only build one habit at a time in “Did You Do it Today?” The #1 feature request I’ve gotten from customers is the ability to track more than one habit in the app. That it doesn’t support this is not because of oversight or laziness. Rather, it’s an intentional choice based upon two interrelated factors:

YOU’RE MORE LIKELY TO SUCCESSFULLY BUILD A HABIT IF YOU ONLY FOCUS ON ONE

James Clear wrote “Atomic Habits”, perhaps the most popular & well known book about habits ever. I’m not a habits guru, but he clearly is, and here’s what he has to say:

“The counterintuitive insight from all of this research is that the best way to change your entire life is by not changing your entire life. Instead, it is best to focus on one specific habit, work on it until you master it, and make it an automatic part of your daily life. Then, repeat the process for the next habit.”

and another from him:

“The general consensus among behavior change researchers is that you should focus on changing a very small number of habits at the same time….Personally, I prefer to focus on building one new behavior into my life at a time. Once that habit becomes routine, then I move on to the next one.”

His book is great (read it!) and his research & thoughts were a big influence when building my app, right down to the decision to only support building one habit at a time, but making it easy to change that habit whenever you’re ready to move on to building the next one.

MORE THAN ONE HABIT MAKES THE APP MUCH MORE COMPLEX

One of my core development tenets is that software has gotten more complex and thus, paradoxically, less useful. My app only does one thing because I want to keep the app simple and thus, useful.

Adding the ability to track more than one habit quickly starts to make the app more complicated. More habits means:

• More daily check-in messages for you to received & respond to
• More pages of tracking calendars & stats for you to keep an eye on
• More pages & fields of settings for you to have to fiddle with to support all the above

My super-simple habit builder then becomes yet another super-complex frustration builder.

So, let’s trust the experts, and appreciate the hard simplicity of building one habit at a time in https://didyoudoittoday.com.