148 Habit and Goal Trackers That Failed Us — And Why

...There’s a big deadline at work tomorrow, not enough time to finish that professional development course, and I really need to brush up on my Spanish... Ah, screw it. I’m going to watch a series instead and eat a chocolate bar to deal with the stress. The to-dos, the plans… well, maybe later.

Sounds familiar?

It certainly sounded familiar to us! We were constantly procrastinating on important tasks and our own desires, and every attempt to fix it failed — like a diet where you stick to it for a week or two, then crash, and end up worse off than before. It even led to burnout, and that’s a truly unpleasant thing, so we had to get serious about finding a solution. Was there anything out there that could help us break this vicious cycle?

We dove into reading books, taking courses, and studying scientific articles — anything that might help solve the problem. Eventually, we found a working methodology — hooray, the magic pill exists! But implementing it into real life wasn’t easy due to the lack of convenient tools. We needed something that would simplify the daily calculations and constant list-rewriting in a notebook — or, even better, do all of it for us. That launched a new phase of our search: we started looking for the right tool. Spoiler: We couldn't find one, which is why we created Achiever Life, based on everything we learned during our search.

"If you want something done right, do it yourself."

Is There an Ideal Life Improvement Tool?

We immediately ruled out all the various to-do lists because tasks pile up much faster than they can be completed, even when you're feeling motivated — let alone when you’re tired and overwhelmed. This just leads to more stress and, ultimately, more procrastination.

Habit and goal trackers most often promised to eliminate procrastination, so that’s where we focused our search.

In the process, we reviewed 148 apps — not every single one on the market, of course, but enough to get the full picture, as many were just copies of each other. Apps like Done, Habits, Habit Tracker, Habit Minder, My Habit, Habit Day, and Raise The Bar, for example, look virtually identical, and there were many similar cases.

As it turned out, the vast majority of apps try to motivate the user with statistics — which every single one offers. The second most popular method is motivational quotes and knowledge bases within the app: Weple Diary has quotes, while Higher Goals lets you write an inspiring phrase for yourself in case you feel like giving up. Knowledge bases can be found in Goal Wizard, Avocation, Fabulous, Habio, and others — some even offer entire courses with structured readings and assignments.

Out of the 148 trackers we studied, only about a dozen-and-a-half apps use statistics as a supplementary motivator, not the main one. These include the well-known Habitica, Repeat, the Chinese app MyGoals, Habit Forest, Task Tower, and a few others based on gamification. Most of these look like games, which wasn't always practical: they're fun to play with initially, but for constant, practical use, their interface is too cluttered. Ultimately, they weren't as effective at solving the problem as we had hoped.

Another interesting category of gamified apps is the "Tamagotchi trackers". The best example is probably Motivator, where each goal turns into a character that dies if you skip a planned action. Since we sometimes have to change plans due to circumstances beyond our control, the characters died unfairly often :( Better examples are apps like Grow and Habit Forest: they let you grow each habit like a tree, and the longer and more regularly you perform the habit, the stronger the tree becomes.

The Problem of Rewards

But let's get back to rewards. Another class of apps gives virtual rewards for completing tasks and habits: user levels, unlocked features, in-game items or settings, and achievements you can share on social media — though your friends probably won't appreciate them unless they use the same app. Habitville, Three Goals, Repeat, Henry, and Tempo use these types of motivation.

Real rewards (which, logically, should follow real actions!) are rare. They are explicitly used only by Habitica, Glan, MyGoals, and MoiPravila. They all assert (and we fully agree!) that an action deserves a reward, and the size of the reward depends on the amount of important work done. Glan tracks the time ratio, while the others assign "coins" for each action, which you can use to "buy" a favorite show or another reward — this is the method we now use in Achiever Life. There's also a small group of apps where rewards exist but are presented as non-essential — for example, Habio's onboarding suggests using a reward technique but doesn't provide a tool to implement it.

So, we found an implementation of the rewards methodology, but you can only go so far with habits alone. The problem of procrastination gets most acute when it comes to complex projects (work or personal) — so an app also needs goals. Unfortunately, none of the apps that successfully implemented the reward methodology had goals as such, so our search continued.

The Problem of Goals and Deadlines

Here, a nasty surprise awaited us: out of the 148 apps we reviewed, only 57 included something about goals. However, more than half of those defined goals as N repetitions of a single task — mostly 21 days, according to a common myth (Habit, Self Improver, Habbit, and others), but sometimes 22 (22 Days) or a month. The creators of iBetter even claim you can create any habit in 7 (seven!) days. Huh.

Some don't limit the time, allowing the user to set a daily/weekly goal, like walking 10,000 steps or reading 250 pages of a book, as in Awesome Habits. Or you set the amount of work and the time to achieve the "goal," like Get Goals and Raise The Bar.

In a few apps, goals are complex projects consisting of different tasks (exactly what we needed!), but it's often unclear how they work. For example, when creating a goal in Higher Goals, you define a deadline and how many hours/kilometers are needed to achieve it, and you can add a task checklist that is completely unrelated to the hours/kilometers and thus doesn't contribute to goal progress. It's the same with Goals Wizard — you have to separately monitor progress and mark completed tasks, which often causes confusion and requires extra effort to fix.

And in almost all apps, goal setting starts with a rigid deadline, which is rarely realistic in real life since timelines are constantly shifting due to circumstances beyond our control. Some projects don't even need deadlines. For instance, when I buy an illustration video course, I want to complete it without delay, but I can't calculate in advance how much time I'll need for lectures and assignments. A rigid deadline in this case just adds stress, eventually making me lose the desire to return to both the course and the app. There are exceptions, like Marvin, where the deadline field is optional. But Marvin, like Goals on Track, Meditivity, and others, was too complicated, requiring too much time to figure out how it works and set it up — not to mention remembering what that button does or which of the fifteen sections holds the feature you need. In the end, we started procrastinating not just on our tasks, but on using the app itself…

In Conclusion

• Simple habit trackers — which are the majority and mostly differ in design — do not solve the procrastination problem because they are designed exclusively for small tasks and offer nothing but statistics. As a result, they last a couple of weeks to a month, and then the app and the habits are forgotten, since using it requires extra effort but delivers no visible results.
• The next group is "goal achievers", which are really just habit trackers with a time/repetition limit. They are useless in the long run — like a diet that only works when you severely restrict everything, after which you quickly return to your old weight or even gain extra.
• Closer to the mark are true goal trackers, where you can track habits and goals composed of tasks, but they are either so complex that using them requires dedicated effort, or they still lack certain essential features — yes, I'm primarily talking about rewards, which are a critically important detail.

Regarding rewards, there is both good news — that apps utilizing the reward methodology do exist, and bad news — that they are extremely rare and mostly inconvenient to use. This is why we now have Achiever Life: we first focused on implementing the methodology that worked for us, but we also paid special attention to ease of use. We're happy to use it ourselves, and now it's your turn to test the effectiveness of Achiever Life for yourself!