Habits, and the table that does not flatter you
Habit apps sell streaks, and streaks are a motivational device rather than an instrument. They celebrate the days you turned up and quietly reset the counter on the days you did not, which means the record of your failures is the one thing the app systematically destroys.
The failures are the data. A habit that survives four good weeks and dies in the fifth has something interesting in the fifth week, and no streak counter will ever show it to you.
Five columns and some blanks
A row per habit, a column per day, an x or nothing. That is the whole instrument, and its virtue is that the blanks are as visible as the marks.
Look at the picture for three seconds and you know more than a streak app would tell you in a month: the writing habit is real, the walking habit is weekend-shaped, and "no screens after 22:00" is not a habit at all yet, it is an intention with one lucky Friday.
What to do with a bad row
Not more discipline. Two questions:
Is the habit too big? "Walk 30 min" fails on days with no 30 free minutes. "Walk after lunch" fails only on days you do not eat.
Is it attached to anything? Habits that survive are attached to something already fixed in the day. The ones that die are floating.
Both fixes are edits to the row's name, which takes five seconds in a table and is the entire iteration loop of habit-building.
Keep it to five rows, and start a new table each month
More than five rows and the table stops being read. And a fresh table per month is what makes the comparison possible: last month's is still there, one bullet above, and the honest question is whether this month looks better than that one.
That is a comparison a streak counter cannot give you, because it only ever shows the present run.
Why the same tree as everything else
Because the interesting correlation is not inside the habit table. It is between the table and the rest of your week: the fortnight the writing habit collapsed is the fortnight the kitchen project was in crisis, and both are in the same outline, a screen apart.
An agent reading both branches can say that sentence for you, which is the one thing here worth delegating: not the ticking, the noticing.
Take the table
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and put three habits in it. Not eight. Three, for one month, and then look at the blanks rather than the marks.