The Best Habit Tracking App for iPhone: Productive

Tracking your habits is a great wayto keep an eye on your progress for a variety of self-improvement goals, and you have an insane number of apps for doing so on the iPhone. However, when it comes to performance and ease of use, we like Productive, because it blends simplicity with the statistics you want to see.

Productive

Platform: iPhone
Price: Free/$3.99
Download Page

Features

• Tracks up to five habits for free, unlimited for $3.99
• Habits fit into a number of different schedules, including specific times or days
• View your stats in a number of different ways, with different data points
• Easy to add new habits and see your schedule for the day
• Tracks streaks, but doesn’t make you practice a habit daily to keep a streak
• Support for reminder with different time options for alarms

Where It Excels

Apps that track your habits are a dime a dozen, so to separate from the pack, an app needs to be easy to use, but still track a lot of data. Productive nails both. You can add a new habit by pulling down on the main screen. You’re then taken to a menu where you can assign that habit a time of day, day of the week, and add a notification. You can set a habit to recur as rarely as once a month, bi-weekly, or on specific days.

Once you set all that up, Productive’s daily dashboard displays the habits you have set for the day and you can swipe to mark them as done. You can tap any habit to see a detailed set of statistics, including your current streak, best streak, and more. You can also check out the Life Log to see how you’re doing in general.

All this means that Productive works for a number of different types of goal setters. If the idea of “don’t break the chain” is appealing to you, Productive supports streaks that form into chains. If it’s less about daily activity and more about slowly building a healthy habit over time, Productive can help there too. Productive appeals to a lot of different types of people with different types of schedules, so it’s a great entry point if you’re not sure which methods work for you.

Where It Falls Short

It’s nice that Productive has a free version so you can check it out without paying anything, but most people will need to pony up the $3.99 for the full version. The free version only allows you to set up five habits and doesn’t give you statistics or notifications for individual habits.

Productive is pretty good about displaying tracked data in a couple different formats, but if you’re a data nerd looking to visualize your habits in a specific way, Productive won’t cut it. Productive is also missing deadlines, which is problematic if you’re tracking something like financial goals. Productive is iOS-only, which means if you switch to Android at some point, or if you want to track habits on your desktop, you’re out of luck.



Via lifehacker