Habit Tracker Template

A habit tracker is the simplest useful sheet there is: the things you mean to do down the side, the days of the month across the top, and a box to fill in for every day you did. Most of the free ones online are a spreadsheet grid with a heading in a script font, and they work about as well as they look. This one is drawn for the pen: the boxes are square and big enough for a tick or a fill, the rows are ruled so your eye stays on one habit, and the names are set in a face you can read from across the desk.

Up to twelve habits fit down the side. Four habits get tall rows, twelve get shorter ones, and the sheet stays one page either way, because a tracker you have to turn over is a tracker you stop filling in. Thirty-one boxes run across each row, and a box at the end of the row, on a switch, is for the month's tally. A short notes strip under the grid takes the one line you want to remember about the month; it comes off with a switch too, and a full sheet of twelve habits gets taller rows for it.

The month is a setting. Undated, the sheet counts 1 to 31 and works for any month, which is what the free version is. Dated, you pick the month and the year, the sheet shortens to that month's length, and the weekday letter sits under every day number with the weekends in the accent color, so a habit you only keep on weekdays has its rhythm on the page. February in a leap year gets its twenty-nine.

The one decision worth explaining is the habit names. The free version comes with eight sensible ones written in, so it works straight off the printer, and the paid version takes yours: twenty-eight characters each, twelve at most, in your words. A tracker with the wrong habits printed on it is a sheet you cross out before you start, so the names are the whole point of making it yours.

Print it at 100%, not fit to page, on ordinary copier paper, and pin it where you will see it in the morning. The light-ink theme is there for the one you print twelve times a year. The free version is this design in the Studio theme, undated, with the eight sample habits, on Letter, with a small credit line at the foot. The paid version carries your habits and your title, the month and year if you want them, all six themes, and comes back in Letter and A4 from one purchase, with a link that works for a year.