Twelve months of the Habit Log, honestly
A first-person, honest twelve-month review of a single app. What stuck, what died, and what the dotted grid taught me. HuntingtonMod is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Huntington Bancshares Incorporated, Huntington National Bank, or Huntington Investment Company.
I started the HuntingtonMod Habit Log on the first Monday of May last year with fourteen habits. Twelve months in, eight of them are still on the grid and six have quietly disappeared. Two of the eight I have never missed. Two others I skip on weekends without guilt. This is a note about what I learnt.
The habits that survived
Walk before breakfast (fourteen minutes, one loop of the block). One glass of water on waking up. Ten minutes of Italian in the morning. A phone call to my mother on Wednesday. No screens after 22:30. Journal at night. Sunday review. Ten push-ups (a joke habit that turned out to be the load-bearing one).
Half of these predate the Habit Log by years and would have survived on paper. Two of them (Italian, mother) genuinely appeared because I wrote them into the grid and saw the empty column at the end of the week. There is no other reason I called my mother on eleven Wednesdays in a row.
The habits that died
Meditate for ten minutes. Read fiction for twenty minutes before bed. Cook something new on Saturday. Write one hundred words in French. Yoga three times a week. Do not eat after 20:00.
Some of these died because they were fantasy habits (yoga three times a week, hello). Some died because they were duplicates of other habits (reading fiction before bed is journal-adjacent — I already had that one). Some died because they were rewritten as different habits later in the year (French turned into Italian, meditation turned into "walk before breakfast"). None of them died because I felt bad about breaking a streak, because there are no streaks.
Why the missing streak counter is the point
Every habit tracker I used before showed a number — "3-day streak", "12-day streak", "your best is 47". The number was a small dopamine hit and, when the streak broke, it was a small punishment. I stopped opening the app after two weeks, every time.
The HuntingtonMod Habit Log has no streak number anywhere. Just a dotted grid — one dot per habit per day, one colour if you did it, empty if you did not. The grid tells you what happened; it does not scold. Twelve months in, I still open the tab. That is unusual for me.
The Sunday heat-map
Every Sunday, the Weekly Review app pulls a heat-map from the Habit Log — a small square, one row per habit, one column per day, warm colour for done, cream for empty. Reading it takes ten seconds and it tells me more about the week than three paragraphs of journal would. It is the single most useful cross-app feature in the workspace.
The habits I added late
In August I added "check the Subscription Tracker before spending more than EUR 20 on a new thing". In November I added "print the Gratitude Notebook to A5 on the last Sunday of the month". Both stuck. Both are the kind of thing I would never have added to a paper tracker because they felt too specific; the dotted grid took them without complaint.
What I would tell someone starting
Add fewer habits than you think. Six is enough. Do not add "meditate for ten minutes" — it is a fantasy habit for most people. Do add one small joke habit (mine was ten push-ups) because a joke habit turns out to be the one that keeps you opening the tab. Skip weekends without guilt. Do not, ever, look for a streak number.
HuntingtonMod is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Huntington Bancshares Incorporated, Huntington National Bank, or Huntington Investment Company. The Habit Log is EUR 3.90/month, first month included.