How to create a Habit Tracker in Notion
Habits are the backbone of success. As James Clear said in his bestselling book “Atomic Habits”, the quality of your life depends on the quality of your habits.
The thing is, habits don’t form overnight. It typically takes 30 days for an individual to get used to a specific action and subsequently develop it into a habit.
And 30 days is an awfully long time.
The first step towards staying consistent with your habits is to establish a tracking system. Give yourself the best chance of success by holding yourself accountable with the aid of a Habit Tracker where you get a sense of satisfaction from ticking them off on a daily basis!
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can create one on Notion.
Create a Database
On a new page, create an in-line database by typing in the command “/database”. You can also hover over a new line and click on the “+” at the extreme left and select in-line database.
New databases are in table view by default. This is fine. There are a couple of formats you can use for a Habit Tracker, but for this guide, I’ll be setting it up in the table view.
Stick to the end for more advanced customization tips!
List Habits
Time to add our habits in!
There should be 3 empty entries pre-loaded in the table. We can go ahead and add the habit description into the “Name” property here.
To add more habits, navigate to either the blue “New” button at the top right or the “New line” at the bottom and repeat the same process.
Checkbox Property
How do we visualise the completion of a habit? Notion has a checkbox property which is perfect for this. But first, we’ll need to create this property within the database.
Open up any of the habits by clicking on its description. See the section at the top with a singular “tags” property? We will be adding checkboxes there. But first, let’s delete that “tags” property as we have no use for it.
Left click on it > delete property.
To add a new property, click on add property > checkbox.
Let’s give the new checkbox property a name! Since we want the Habit Tracker to track habits throughout the week (I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think it’s efficient to only have 1 checkbox as I’ll have to tick and untick everyday for the following day), let’s name the first checkbox Monday.
Rinse and repeat and create 6 more checkboxes, each of them named after the remaining 6 days of the week. Now we have a checkbox representing each day of the week, and we just need to tick the corresponding checkbox to signify we’ve done the habit on that day!
When we exit the page and take a look at the Habit Tracker after all these additions, it should look something like this.
P.S. Format tip: unlike other properties, checkboxes can have their column widths reduced till only the checkbox is left. It’s down to a matter of preference, but I love how clean it looks when only the checkbox can be seen. After all, if we arrange it by order of days in the week, we don’t need to actually see the title, do we?
Advanced Add-ons
Even though we’ve tied down the core functions of the Habit Tracker and it works perfectly fine without any further touches, as a wise man once said, there’s always room for improvement.
Here are two possible additions that you can implement to further upgrade the Habit Tracker.
Progress Bar
Visualise your progress towards full habit completion with the inclusion of an automated progress bar.
This is a little complicated as it involves formulas, so make sure to follow the steps closely.
First off, let’s start by creating a formula property. Once you see the formula column on the table, left click on the empty field which will prompt a formula window to emerge. This is where you enter the Notion formula!
Unfortunately, the formula isn’t straightforward. You can’t just copy-paste it in its entirety and expect it to work. You need to replace certain elements of the formula with the actual properties in your Habit Tracker. I’ll highlight the chunks where you need to manually delete and replace.
round(100*(toNumber(Monday)+toNumber(Tuesday)+toNumber(Wednesday)+toNumber(Thursday)+toNumber(Friday)+toNumber(Saturday)+toNumber(Sunday))/7)/100
Replace all the days of the week with the actual checkbox properties. Select them within the formula window (make sure you don’t touch the surrounding brackets) and choose from the properties on the left bottom of the formula bar. When you’re done, your formula will look like this.
All that’s left to do is to left click on the formula property -> edit property -> number format -> percent -> Show as “bar”.
And voila! A progress bar that increases in completion when you tick a habit off.
Reset Button
Isn’t it a hassle to have to manually untick all the checkboxes at the end of every week in preparation for the next? Especially if you have lots of habits.
There’s a solution though. Automate this with a new Notion feature: the amazing button.
Go to a new block and add a button with the “/button” command. Name it “New Week”.
Under the “Do this” section, select Edit Database. Choose the Habit Tracker (if you have not given the database a name, it’ll be “Untitled”) and click on “Edit a property”. Select all the 7 checkbox properties and on the right of it, set the option to “unchecked”. Confirm the changes you’ve made by clicking on the blue “Done” button at the top right.
Your button setting should look like this!
Whenever you click on the button now, it will reset all of the checkboxes for the new week!
Supporting your notion to Notion.
Hey, it’s Ken from Caffiend. Thanks for visiting my shop and reading my content! I hope I was able to help you out in one way or another.
If you’re new to Notion and would like to learn more about it, I recommend checking out my Beginner's Guide to Notion.
Or if you’re just looking for some templates to kick-start your Notion journey, consider my free Notion Starter Pack or Notion Life Suite featuring an array of curated templates meant to keep every aspect of your life organized.
Also, if you have any questions or just want to talk Notion, feel free to drop me an email at ken@itscaffiend.com. I promise I don't bite!
Until next time, stay safe and as always, stay productive!
