Setting a New Year's resolution is the easy part. Following through to build a good habit where it gets tricky. These habit tracker apps and tools will ensure you stick to your resolutions.

Some say a habit takes 21 days, others say it takes 66 days, and some studies even say it requires 36 weeks. The one thing everyone agrees upon is that consistency is key to building a new habit. Habit trackers have shown to be useful for that, especially when they show you the amount of effort you've put in so far, compelling you to put that effort again when you're feeling demotivated.

1. Blobby (Android, iOS): Cute Habit Tracker With "Range Goals"

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Blobby is a cute virtual buddy helping track your habits
Blobby asks you to make two goals for any habit, a challenging one and a minimum one
Blobby's built-in journal and statistics help reinforce good habits

Add a little cuteness to your habit tracker with Blobby, a cute and bubbly emoji buddy for your habit needs. Blobby has an interesting approach to ensuring you stick to the habits you want to form by separating them into categories and setting different types of goals.

The app divides your life into five spheres: Fitness, Career, Social, Finance, and Mind. In the free version, you can set habits in three of these categories, or pay for the full version to unlock all. Blobby also asks you to add "Range Goals," i.e. a baseline and a challenge. For example, in Fitness, you could add a 30-minute run as a challenge, while 10 minutes of planks can be your baseline. That way, you ensure you do the minimum even when you're not doing the max goal.

When you finish any activity, mark it as Done on Blobby to track it for the day. The app also includes a mood journal to record how you are feeling that day, based on the habits you achieved. You can view all these stats in the calendar dashboard.

Download: Blobby for Android | iOS (Free)

2. Life of Discipline (Web): Advanced Daily Habit Tracker With Calendar Heat Maps

Life of Discipline is a simple app to create multiple

Jerry Seinfeld's now-famous habit building idea of "Don't Break the Chain" simply says to keep crossing the calendar every day by doing one activity daily. There are some great apps based on this popular productivity method, but Life of Discipline goes the extra mile to add something new.

Instead of just checking off a box to say you did what you were supposed to, you can track a habit in three ways:

  1. Timer: Track how many hours or minutes you spent on a habit (e.g., how much time did you spend on your side project today)
  2. Number: Track a custom unit (e.g., how many miles you ran today)
  3. Binary: Track whether you did or didn't do a task (e.g., did you workout today or not)

Then give your calendar a color, set which days of the week your habit streak should count for, and select the statistics you want to see like daily average, standard deviation, etc.

You can set up multiple goals, each with its own calendar and metrics, to track all your habit streaks. You earn points for maintaining any streak.

The app also integrates with Notion, so you can update your logs from there directly if you use the popular productivity app. You can also add friends in Life of Discipline to keep track of each other's goals and even set leaderboards.

3. Avocation (Android, iOS): Learn Habit Science While Tracking Goals

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Avocation's main screen shows all the different habits you're tracking, divided by which time of the day they're meant for
Avocation has short reads to explain the science of building habits, which helps you understand why these small changes to affect big outcomes
When you maintain your streak of fulfilling habit tasks, you'll grow your plant in Avocation

Habit tracking will usually fail as a method if you don't know the science behind how we build habits, say the creators of Avocation. So along with habit tracking, their app teaches you the prevailing wisdom around human habits (estimated to take up 45% of our daily activities).

Through 10 lessons, the makers explain what they learned about habit formation. Each lesson is only a 5-minute read, and the series elucidates the science of habits and the power of tiny changes. Remember, you aren't going to change habits overnight. Even after you read them once, these lessons are worth reading periodically on your habit change journey to remind yourself why you're on the path you've chosen.

Along with this knowledge, Avocation is a robust habit tracker too. You can set habits for morning, afternoon, evening, or any time of the day, which form the four sections of your dashboard. Each activity gets a custom color and icon. You can set which days of the weak it'll pop up on your dashboard.

Avocation also adds a little gamification to your habit streak by giving you a virtual plant. Each day that you complete one activity, your virtual plant will grow.

Download: Avocation for Android | iOS (Free)

4. SnapHabit (Android, iOS): Habit Tracker With Friends and Guided Habit Journeys

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SnapHabit's main screen is an easy way to track your habits, while learning about new ones you can make
SnapHabit journeys take you through a guided exercise to build a good new habit
When you achieve any task, you can write notes and add photos in your SnapHabit streak

One of the proven ways to build good habits and stick to resolutions is to share your goals with friends or a support group. SnapHabit is a habit tracker that implores you to invite friends to share a habit goal so that you can support and motivate each other to achieve it.

You can set frequency and reminders when you create any habit goal in SnapHabit. Helpfully, when you open the app, you'll immediately see all your chains, and you can tap what you achieved. You also have the option to add more details about your achievement by writing a note or attaching a photo.

Apart from all this, SnapHabit tries to inculcate good habits by offering guided journeys, such as practicing meditation, learning lettering, or taking steps to be a conscious consumer. Add a journey to your habit tracker, and you'll get a daily lesson as well as an exercise. SnapHabit also recommends joining the group of others taking the same journey, as a community experience helps in building habits.

Download: SnapHabit for Android | iOS (Free)

5. Bernard Zitzer's Habit Trackers (PDF): Free Printables to Track Multiple or Single Habits

Bernard Zitzer's habit tracker printable is one of the best free downloads on the internet to track a habit with pen and paper

Entrepreneur Bernard Zitzer learned a lot about productivity and habit forming or breaking while overcoming caffeine, sugar, and internet addictions. His newfound knowledge resulted in two of the internet's best free printable habit trackers.

The Multiple Habit Tracker (shown above as a filled sheet) gives you the right mix of motivation and "don't break the chain" productivity. As you can see from the image, Zitzer recommends having multiple goals for a habit (Plan A and Plan B) to ensure you do something towards your goal rather than fail completely.

At the day 10, 20, and 30 mark, you can add a little reward for yourself. Meanwhile, the questions at the bottom of the sheet remind you why you are doing this and your motivations. Plus, his three rules will keep you going when all else fails.

If all of this is too complex for you, you can instead turn to Zitzer's Single Habit Tracker printable. It's all about building a habit in 30 days by doing it every day and crossing off the day. While that's the recommended way to use it, given the large box at your disposal, feel free to get creative, like drawing an emoji about how you felt that day.

Be Kind to Yourself

Habit tracking is an effective way to ensure you meet your new year's resolutions. But if you miss a day, don't get caught up in that failure. It happens to everyone, and you have to remind yourself to be kind to yourself. Change isn't easy, and as long as you keep trying, you will end up building the habits you want to.