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Comment by jbjbjbjb | Hacker News Reader

Habit trackers are great when you pair them with a smart watch and automations. I use an app called Streaks, Apple Watch and Shortcuts. Streaks can pick up health data and in Shortcuts I’ve set it up so it increments a counter in Streaks to keep track of when I open Instagram or Twitter.

I’m not sure it gives me enough motivation to do something I don’t want to. But it does help me stay on track and not forget the things I want to do.

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Oh goodness, how did I never think of using “open app” automations in shortcuts to track opens. I use many shortcuts, but never put two and two together.

Thank you!! And then do you have a negative habit in streaks, for example “no more than five instagram opens in a day”?

Actually, do you find the counter reliable? It hasn’t been working so well for me with the Tally app.

Edit: worked well with streaks. I think tally’s shortcuts integration is poor, whereas Streaks’ is excellent

I think it works well enough for me I have my daily count set to 10. So I’m really trying to prevent those days where I’m mindlessly checking it throughout the day.

Have you used Habitica ? How does it compare to Streaks ? I was interest in trying Streaks also for the reason that it has a clean UI and an Apple Watch app but the high price is turning me down.

I’ve not tried Habitica. I went with streaks because it is a one off payment

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