Is there a habit tracker without streaks?

What it uses instead

Each completion gets something right away: an ocean moment, a quote, or a reward you wrote for yourself. Which one is the surprise. And each habit grows its own ocean on your phone, from Night toward Full Glory, built from your completions whenever they happen, so time away never dims it.

Why leave streaks out

In seven studies, seeing a broken streak lowered people's willingness to keep going, compared with an intact one, and the drop was bigger when people blamed themselves for the break (Silverman and Barasch 2022). It is one paper, and none of its studies tested Rewarding Habits.

One day off matters less than it feels. In the best-known study of how habits form, an occasional skipped day did not seriously set people back (Lally et al. 2010). The bigger risk is reading a slip as a verdict on yourself, which is what can turn a lapse into a relapse (Marlatt and Gordon; Bouton 2000). More on this: do streaks make people give up?

Is it for you?

Rewarding Habits is for people who'd rather a day off cost them nothing. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Android, Apple Watch, and Wear OS.

In Rewarding Habits

What the app does

Press and hold to complete a habit, and the reward lands the moment you finish. There's no streak counter anywhere in the app, and the coach never brings up streaks.

Sources

• Silverman, J. & Barasch, A. (2022). On or Off Track: How (Broken) Streaks Affect Consumer Decisions. Journal of Consumer Research.
• Lally, P. et al. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology. A median of ~66 days.
• Marlatt, G. & Gordon, J.; Bouton, M. (2000). Relapse prevention; lapse vs. relapse.

Rewarding Habits is a skill-building app informed by psychological science. It isn't therapy or a crisis service. Every source above is also on our science page, with more of the research behind the app.