Habits

Habits is a todo list based on habit formation through completion of repeated tasks.

The view is divided into four different scopes, from left to right: daily, monthly, yearly and project-based tasks. This is intended to give you a quick overview of your goals in both the short and long term.

Within a scope, each task is represented by a button. Clicking the button will cycle the task between unset, complete and incomplete status. These statuses are used to calculate long-term statistics.

Task statistics are calculated based on shared task names across scopes.

For example, say you have a New Years resolution of exercising four times a week. You would first add an "Exercise" task to the scope for this year; copy it to the current month using the clipboard button. Then you would copy it from the month on each day you want to exercise.

When you begin marking these daily tasks as complete or incomplete, you will get a percentage of tasks completed for months and years. For example, if you set out to exercise 14 days in January and successfully did it 50% of the time, you would see "Exercise 7/14 (50%)" on both the monthly and yearly summary.

You also get a streak indicator, so if you exercised successfully seven days in a row at the end of the month, you will see 7/7 meaning that your best streak and current streak are both seven days. Streaks only break when a task is incomplete, so if your goal is to exercise on non-consecutive days (say Monday/Wednesday/Friday).

The goal, of course, is to get this completion as close to 100% as possible. The benefit of using meditations comes in triaging multiple goals by getting a quick visual overview of progress. For example, if you have five current goals and none of them are doing well, it may be time to focus on only two or three.

It is also beneficial in tracking things that you are good at doing and simply trying to maintain and log. For example, say you are happy with how you generally eat, but you end up violating your rules when eating out with friends or coworkers. In a case like this, you might add a daily task like "Diet" representing whether or not you eat well, and only become concerned if completion drops below 80% (meaning you're going off-diet more than one out of every five days).

Not every long-term task involves daily repetition, for which meditations has the concept of projects, which are displayed on the far right. Active projects should be "pinned"; pinned projects have a flame indicator next to them which indicates momentum. The flame is calculated by how many tasks with the project's name have been completed in the last few weeks.

So for example if you create a project "Refurbish bathroom", then daily tasks would be created with the name "Refurbish bathroom" each time you completed an hour or so of work towards the project.

Projects can also contain tasks, which can be accessed like the time-based tasks by clicking on a project name. These do not count towards the flame indicator but can be used to track major milestones.

The point of all of this is to track these things with as little friction as possible; I have my browser open meditations on startup, and I leave it open throughout the day. Generally I simply note things down as I complete them, and at the end of the day I copy from the monthly to the daily list to plan the next day. I re-assess my daily tasks and progress at the end of each month.

Filter and task export

Occasionally one wants to get an overview of what you've been doing towards a particular goal, in which case the "filter" feature at the top is a handy way to do so. Simply time in the name of the task, such as "Exercise" and only tasks matching that name will be displayed. You can also add a date range to this, which can then be combined with the export feature to download a markdown text file of your tasks and comments. You can use this to e.g. export an exercise log to show to other people.