Habit

by leonardossmoke

According to the book The Power of Habit, it takes about a month for a new habit to form.  According to Zenhabits , you should really only start one habit per month: that has the best chance for success.

I’m creating an Omega-3 supplement habit, since the right kind of omega-3 supplements have a lot of rather wondeful antidepressant effects and help your focus and concentration. I’ve done it for the last three days, and in my enthusiasm I made the mistake of trying to start a sunlight habit, a daily writing habit, and an exercize habit at the same time.   So I’m paring it down to just the omega-3 habit. I went out and bought the supplements, and I stashed them by my bed and pop pills first thing in the morning.  It takes me all of five minutes.

The rules for building habits seem absurdly simple: do something daily for a month, only focus on doing that thing, and make it as easy as possible.   It seems like the perfect test case for learning how to build a simple iphone app.

So let’s do some design.  What would our habit-forming app need to do?  In its most basic form, it would need to let you input one habit, track you for at least 30 days, and, each day, ask you if you have completed that habit. If you don’t complete the habit, you have to start back over on day one: if you do complete the habit, you win.

Lets build it.