

Ask HN: Daily Recurring Checklist - stcredzero

Is there an app with a good workflow for a daily recurring checklist?  I'm looking for a web app or something that I can use from anywhere which I can use to establish some habits.  (Stuff like push-ups in the morning, make my bed, go sort my junk mail, etc...)
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philiphodgen
I am using the Dayta app on my iPhone for this purpose. It is working. Here is
what I do.

1\. Find a small habit to change. (Example: get more sleep).

2\. Find a time/place in my daily routine where this new habit will go.
("Immediately after awakening").

3\. Think (this might be easy or hard) to quantify a change in this habit.
"Lose weight" is easy to quantify. "Be happy" is not. (Easy to quantify sleep,
and I round to the nearest quarter hour and I'm not OCD about accuracy. I'm
"grenade" accurate).

4\. Set it up in Dayta to measure the action daily.

5\. Look at the little graph that Dayta generates.

My experience is that I have fewer of the 5 hour sleep nights and more of the
7 hour sleep nights.

I have added "weight loss" to the morning routine successfully.

The next one I added was $ spent at Starbucks. This one cut my coffee spending
dramatically. Good for me, not so good for Starbucks.

Now I've added "Hours spent writing" with a target of 1 per day. This one is
not so successful (yet) because I haven't found a time to park this habit.

Before this I used a Google spreadsheet and created an icon on my iPhone for
the data entry. This was simple, inelegant, and worked like a champ.

Credits:

1\. The idea for finding a place to park your change in habit during your
daily routine came from an article I read somewhere about a Stanford psych
prof (I think) who talked about this being a key to effecting changes.

2\. The idea for small changes being successful was from the same source.

3\. The idea for starting with a very small set of changes in the daily
checklist/routine came from Sebastian Marshall (thanks @lionhearted).

4\. The idea for using a Google Spreadsheet with (effectively) a roll-your-own
mini web app on the iPhone came from Mr. Google somewhere.

5\. The idea of trying hard to not think Brilliant Thoughts but instead accept
that other people might have good ideas and I should be humble enough to
accept them gratefully came from a friend who is now deceased.

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swombat
I've tried using apps for this, and I've found that the thing that works best
is a plain old wall-calendar. Hang that up somewhere visible, and make one box
on each day for each of the habits you're trying to build. Put a green tick in
once you've done it, and try to keep it up every day.

Apps are easy to ignore. A wall calendar is harder to forget about.

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shantanubala
Agreed. But if you want to go digital, Remember the Milk works fairly well for
me, and just printing out my tasks works wonders too.

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ptm
I wrote this app some time back - <http://www.dailytodo.org/> \- that might
help.

