Habits are the small repeated things alongside training: sleep, steps, water, protein at breakfast. Basecamp shows them as history rather than a list of ticks, which changes what you can see.
The heatmap
Completion history for the last four weeks, laid out by weekday. It answers a question a tick list cannot: not whether somebody is keeping a habit, but when they stop keeping it.
A column that is empty every Saturday is a different problem from a habit that faded after week two. The first needs a plan for weekends; the second needs a smaller habit. Both look identical as a percentage.
The numbers
- This week: progress so far, which is a partial figure until the week ends.
- 30-day rate: the honest measure. Long enough to survive a bad week, short enough to reflect where somebody is now.
- Since created: the whole history, which mostly tells you how long the habit has existed.
There is an average 30-day rate across all of a client's habits too. Falling, across everything at once, usually means life has got busy rather than that any single habit was wrong.
Habits your client made
Clients can create their own habits, and those are marked as created by your client. Worth noticing rather than skimming past.
Somebody who has added their own habits is telling you what they think matters, unprompted. That is useful information about a client and it is also the habit most likely to stick, because nobody imposed it. Ask about them rather than replacing them.
A habit can also show as locked, which means it is not yours to edit from here.
Setting good ones
The test is whether a client can answer yes or no at the end of the day without arguing with themselves. Three or four is plenty; a list of twelve is a list nobody reads.
Use the heatmap to review rather than to police. A habit ticked every day for two months has been learned and can come off the list. One that was never ticked was too big. That is a fact about the habit you set, not about the client.