With vision models, evidence-ing should be easy, but what's the best way to make it privacy first without needing a dedicate GPU tower at home?
I also think your thinking on tick marks is backwards. If you're struggling to "fully do" a goal, you should absolutely be giving yourself tick marks. That way the desire to to maintain the streak helps keep you in the rhythm. Habit trackers aren't trying to "perfectly record your activities" - they use psychology to push you into building a habit. Once you get into the stage where the habit is established but you want to push yourself - then you get into detailed food and workout journaling that will let you track intensity over time. But if you aren't making it to the gym the intensity doesn't matter yet.
Feel free to email me via this site if anyone wants to TestFlight it.. I’m currently rebuilding the UI but the next release should be available for testing in the next week.
So here just going to the gym could be enough to check of the box for the habit, rather than say you failed if you don't do the whole 25 minutes or you feel like you wasted time at the gym.
You of course can build on top but it's good to have that fallback minimum.
You're gonna do better at building the habit working out for 1 minute per day than 7 days in a row for 60 minutes, a few times a year.
i don't understand the rationale behind cheating one's own self improvement journal. what's the end game?
Next day, your inner critic and saboteur tell you something along the lines of: "You shouldn't go today - you're tired, there's so much work that you should do instead, and you're not even doing the gym actually/properly (AGAIN), just look at yesterday, you couldn't even do 25 min, you've cheated and have now tainted it". Even though it was the same exact voice that led you to do it yesterday.
An automated measurement system is the way to go. Like the poster above you said, the “cheating” rarely happens in a binary Yes/No situation or me going into a log and editing it (that would obviously be silly). It happens in the rolling measurements, the 22mins vs 25 mins hard day gray zone situations
i have done things like "do x at least once three times a week" and then had a separate counter for how many times. it's good to track intensity or progression, but i think the most value comes from "did you do it at all that day?" and then sticking to a plan that involves n days a week.
the finer grained tracking can contribute to "i am not on target, so maybe it doesn't matter" sort of thinking where maybe the most valuable thing is "i am setting time aside n days a week and sticking to at least attempting the activity on that schedule."
ymmv of course, this stuff is deeply personal!