Most Notion habit trackers look great for about two weeks.
Then you miss a day.
Then another.
And suddenly the charts are wrong, the reviews are meaningless, and the whole thing quietly falls apart.
I know this because I built one.
A couple of years ago I created what I thought was a pretty good Notion habit and goal tracking system. It was clean. It was structured. It had formulas, relations, ratings, calendars and progress bars. Every day was a row in a database. Every habit was a checkbox. Every goal was linked to those days. You could filter by mood, sort by effectiveness, and review how well a week or month had gone.
Thousands of people downloaded it.
And slowly, I stopped using it.
Not because it was badly designed. It was clever (Too clever). The problem was that it quietly required perfect data to be useful. Miss a day here and there and suddenly weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews stopped being meaningful. The system needed me to show up flawlessly for it to work, and real life does not work like that.
Why the 2022/23 Notion Habit Tracker Failed
The deeper problem was how the old system treated progress.
If I set a goal of running 5km and I ran 2km, the day was a failure.
If I wanted to read 10 pages and I read 8, it did not count.
In real life, those days mattered. In the system, they did not. Partial effort and no effort looked the same. Over time that disconnect is what kills momentum. You are still doing the work, but the tool you built to support you keeps telling you that you are behind.
So I started again.
Removing Goals From the Daily Habit Tracker
The biggest shift was removing goals from my daily system.
I still have goals. I would like to weigh 65kg in six months. I would like to read more. I would like to be fitter. But those do not belong in my daily notes. They belong in reviews.
Daily life is about direction and action, not finish lines.
So instead of asking “did I hit my target today”, the system now only asks two things:
What did I do
How do I feel
Every day gets a new page. New day, new page.
What I Track Instead of Targets
My Notion habit tracker now tracks simple, concrete things:
- Weight
- Pages read
- Sleep
- Mood
- Supplements
- Kms Run etc.
There are no targets. No thresholds. No pass or fail.
Ten pages is better than zero.
A bad night still counts.
A low energy day still gets logged.
That one change makes everything else work.
Why a Day Based Habit Tracker Is More Sustainable
The old system needed everything to be completed for the day to be valid. The new one just needs something to happen.
If I read 5 pages, that becomes a data point.
If I sleep badly, that becomes a data point.
If my mood is low, that becomes a data point.
Over time, those points turn into trends. And trends tell a much more honest story than any checkbox ever could. They show whether I am moving in the direction I want to move, even when individual days are messy or imperfect.
One side effect of this is that it also makes quiet avoidance visible. If a habit keeps showing up as zero, that is useful information. Something is getting in the way. Maybe the habit is badly framed. Maybe it is the wrong season for it. Maybe it needs to be paused or reframed rather than forced. Because nothing is marked as failure, you can look at those gaps with curiosity instead of guilt and decide what to change.
Goals vs Direction in a Notion Habit System
I still set goals. They give me a horizon.
But I do not let them judge my days.
A goal is a finish line.
A direction is the way I want to move.
“Be 65kg” is a goal.
“Move towards better health” is a direction.
“Read 20 books this year” is a goal.
“Become someone who reads most days” is a direction.
Goals are binary. You either hit them or you do not. Directions are continuous. You are either moving in them or you are not.
That is why goals belong in reviews. They help you step back and ask whether you are happy with where things are going.
The daily note is for something simpler: showing you whether today moved you in the right direction.
A Habit Tracker That Becomes a Timeline
One unexpected benefit of building everything around days is that the system becomes a memory as much as a tracker.
I think in days.
That thing I worked on last Thursday.
The idea I had before the weekend.
That week when I was reading a lot.
Because every journal entry, habit log and note is attached to a date, I can go back and see the full context of my life at any point. What I was doing. How I was feeling. What I was thinking about.
It becomes a timeline, not just a dashboard.
What I Am Building First
The first thing I am building is the habit tracker with journaling.
No task system yet.
No exercise programs.
Just a simple, day based page where you can log your habits, write a few lines, and build up an honest picture of how your life is actually going.
Once that foundation is solid, the rest can grow on top of it.
That is what this series is about.
Not a productivity fantasy.
Just a system that makes it easier to keep showing up.