How to make a Habit Tracker in Notion (2023)

This post will show you how to make a simple Habit Tracker in Notion.

• Click on the following link to see my collection of the 7 best Notion Habit Tracker Templates.
• And click here to check out my Habit Compass Template for Notion.

According to Wikipedia, “a habit …is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.”

We built most of our habits without thinking much about the process. Often we are not even aware that so many of our actions are habits.

Some of them were drummed into us by society like brushing your teeth in the morning or showering daily.

Others we built by ourselves because we enjoyed doing certain things, like reading the newspaper after waking up or doing sports after a hard work day.

In both cases, the key to building new habits is consistency. A study by the University College London showed in 2009 that we need an average of 66 days for forming new habits.

This is why tracking your habits is the best way to establish new behaviors in your life. The more often you do something, the less willpower is required to do this very thing.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. James Clear

Habit tracking is traditionally done with pen and paper. Due to the rise of productivity apps like Notion, there is now a high demand for Notion Habit Tracker Templates. In the following paragraphs, I will show you how to make a habit tracker in Notion yourself.

If you want to save time, you can also download this template for free by becoming a subscriber:

Building a Habit Tracker Template in Notion

First, we need to create a new database. You can call it Habits, Habit Tracking, or whatever you want.

To actually track your daily habits you need to create several checkbox properties. I suggest starting with 1-3 properties, but of course, you can track as many habits as you like. Just be aware that trying to establish too many new things at once will potentially burn you out. Better start slowly, but be consistent.

At the moment of this writing (November 2022) you can not hide the first Name property, despite not needing it for this template. I renamed it into Notes, because I now use it to write down things that influenced my habit performance on the respective dates.

What you should create as well is a Date property so you can enter the date of each day. The final Notion database will look like this:

You could enter the dates manually, or use a filter to automatically create a date for the current day when creating a new row.

Use the advanced filter rule seen in my screenshot: Where Date Is within The past month. This filter will automatically add the current day to the Date property when creating a new entry. Of course, you can adapt the timeframe to your preferences.

Maybe you just want to see the entries from the last week?

Or maybe you want to create a view where you see entries from the past year?

That is up to you!

For myself, I prefer to see my habit performance of the last month. More would be overwhelming for me, and less would not show me enough data to recognize patterns of my habit-tracking performance.

Also, have a look at the property “Sleeping Hours”. This is not a checkbox but a Number property because in some cases like when tracking sleep, or repetitions of a workout, we want to track numeric data.

How to make a weekly or monthly habit tracker review in Notion?

When you look back at your daily data, it may be difficult to spot trends or patterns because the sheer number of entries is too large. But if we aggregate the data into a weekly, monthly, or yearly view, we should be able to see our performance over specific time periods much better.

In my example habit tracking template, I am using weekly reviews. For doing so, I created a second database, which I uncreatively called Weekly Reviews.

Again, we have a Date property, but here it displays a date range of the week you are tracking. In this database, the name property has an actual purpose because it is used for writing down the calendar week number. For example, the week between October 23-29 refers to calendar week 43.

A relationship property links this database to the first habit-tracker database. There, every new entry needs to be linked with the respective calendar week entry.

To aggregate your weekly data, you now need to create rollup properties in the weekly review database. Create a rollup for every habit you are tracking in the habit tracker database.

See the following screenshot, to learn how to connect your rollup property with the respective habit.

The rollup properties show you the weekly percentage of checked habits, which makes it easy to review your weekly performance over time.

Do you remember that we used a numeric property for tracking sleeping hours? In this case, we are of course not showing the percentage tracked but the calculated average.

How to track habits with recurring tasks in Notion?

In October 2022, Notion finally enabled the creation of recurring tasks in databases. This feature can of course be used for building a habit tracker.

You create recurring tasks by creating a database template and turning on the repeat option.

You can repeat daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. I prefer using the weekly option. Not because I want habits to appear just once a week, but because it gives you the opportunity to select on which day of the week the habit will appear. For example, you will probably not do business habits during the weekend. The weekly option enables you to just activate them during workdays.

Of course, you can also make the habit template appear every day of the week when it is a daily habit.

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I wish you a lot of joy in building your own habit tracker in Notion. If you want to steal my free habit tracker template for free, please subscribe to my newsletter: