Habit tracker for Windows: build daily habits on your PC

A habit tracker for Windows does one job: it shows you, every day, whether you did what you meant to, and for how many days in a row. Here is the method in six steps; the rest of this guide fills in the detail.

1. 1
   Step 1: Pick a tracker that runs on your PC

   Windows has no habit tracker of its own, so choose an app from the comparison below.

2. 2
   Step 2: Add one small, specific habit

   “Read 20 pages” is easier to keep than “read more”. One or two habits are plenty to begin with.

3. 3
   Step 3: Decide how it is counted

   Tick it yourself, or, for something you do on the computer, let the app measure it: an hour in your code editor, 20 minutes on a language site.

4. 4
   Step 4: Put it where you will see it

   A desktop widget keeps the habit in view, so remembering to check is no longer part of the job.

5. 5
   Step 5: Tie it to something you already do

   After the morning coffee, or before you open your email. A fixed cue makes a habit easier to repeat.

6. 6
   Step 6: Look at the graph once a week

   If a goal is too big, shrink it rather than drop the habit.

If you spend most of your day at a computer, that screen is where a reminder works. A phone app waits until you open it, or sends a notification you swipe away. A widget on your desktop is in view every time you minimise a window.

And many habits worth building happen on the computer itself: code, a language, writing, a course. A tracker that knows how long you spent in an app or on a site can fill the day in for you, which removes the step that is easiest to forget: logging it.

Windows 10 and Windows 11 don't include a habit tracker. Two free Microsoft apps come close:

• Microsoft To Do, free in the Microsoft Store, can repeat a task daily, on weekdays, weekly or on a custom schedule, and its My Day planner suggests tasks for the day. But it is a to-do list: no streak, and no calendar of the days you did it.
• Focus sessions in the Clock app, which comes with Windows, track progress towards a daily focus goal. That covers one habit, focused time. Our guide to focus mode on Windows 11 covers it.

Neither measures time in an app for you, shows a habit as a graph, or puts it on your desktop. For that, you need an app.

The simplest kind of habit is a box you tick. That suits anything away from the keyboard, like reading, stretching or a walk: you did it or you didn't, and only you know.

Habits on the computer are different. “Code for an hour” or “Study Japanese for 20 minutes” is already measured by the time you spend in the app or on the site, so a tracker that counts that time can mark the day done by itself, and show a day you got partway through instead of an empty square.

TimeWell does both. A check-in is ticked by you, in the app or on the Habits widget. A time goal is a daily target in minutes or hours for one app or one website, counted from your usage the way TimeWell counts screen time: while it is in front of you with the screen on and unlocked, reading and watching included.

These are the options worth considering on Windows as of October 2026. We make TimeWell, so weigh our view accordingly. Each of the others is the better choice for someone.

• Pick TickTick for habits beside your tasks, synced to your phone.
• Pick Habitify for a dedicated habit app on every device, with reminders.
• Pick OpenHabitTracker if you want free, open source and private, and streaks make you anxious.
• Pick Habitica if a game is what keeps you coming back.
• Pick a spreadsheet or a Notion template if you'd rather design the system yourself.
• Pick TimeWell if your habits happen on the computer and you want them counted for you, on your desktop, and kept on your PC.

The best-known study comes from Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London, published in 2010 in the European Journal of Social Psychology. They asked 96 volunteers to pick one new eating, drinking or exercise habit, repeat it once a day at the same point in their routine for 12 weeks, and score each day how automatic it had become.

How automatic a habit felt rose fastest in the early weeks, then levelled off. Among the 39 people whose results fitted the researchers' model well, the median time to get 95% of the way to that plateau was 66 days. Individuals ranged from 18 to 254 days, and the longest times were projections beyond the 12 weeks. A single missed day barely changed how the habit developed.

A 2024 review of 20 studies, with 2,601 participants in all, points the same way. Only four of those studies reported how long habits took: their medians were 59 to 66 days and their averages 106 to 154 days, and individuals ranged from 4 to 335 days. Habits done in the morning, and habits people chose for themselves, tended to be stronger.

A streak is the number of days in a row you have kept a habit. It motivates because it is fragile: after twenty days, you don't want to watch it go back to zero. The risk is the morning after a miss, when a zero can make the whole habit feel lost.

A habit tracker with a graph gives the fuller picture. A contribution graph, the grid of squares GitHub made familiar, shows every day of the last few months at once. One empty square among sixty filled ones looks like what it is: a gap, not a collapse. Lally's study points the same way: a single missed day made little difference.

Using a streak tracker on Windows 11 without the guilt

• Never miss twice. One missed day is noise. Protect the day after a miss, so one gap doesn't turn into two.
• Keep a minimum version. On a bad day, two pages or ten minutes still counts as showing up.
• Fill in honestly. If you did it but forgot to tick, mark it. In TimeWell, click any day on a check-in habit's graph to tick or untick it.
• Judge by the graph, not the streak. Count the days you managed in the last three months; TimeWell shows that number under each habit.

In TimeWell, today never breaks a streak while it is still today; the count starts again only once a whole day has passed without the habit. If streaks stress you, OpenHabitTracker shows how overdue each habit is instead, and leaves streaks off unless you turn them on.

TimeWell is a screen time app for Windows with habits built in. Here is how to set up both kinds of habit and put them on your desktop. If you haven't installed it yet, start at the download page.

A check-in habit

1. 1
   Step 1: Start a new habit

   Open the Habits page, select New habit and name it, for example “Read 20 pages”.

2. 2
   Step 2: Choose Check in

   Under Track by, pick Check in, choose one of the six colours and select Add habit.

3. 3
   Step 3: Tick it each day

   On the Habits page, in today's habits on the Overview page, or straight from the Habits widget.

A time-goal habit for an app or a website

1. 1
   Step 1: Start a new habit

   Select New habit and name it, for example “Code for an hour”.

2. 2
   Step 2: Choose App time or Website time

   For App time, pick the app from the list of apps TimeWell has seen you use, most used first, or search for it. For Website time, type the domain, such as duolingo.com; subdomains count too.

3. 3
   Step 3: Set the daily goal

   Enter minutes or hours, or pick 15m, 30m, 1h or 2h, then select Add habit. The day fills in by itself once you have spent that long.

Put the Habits widget on your desktop

1. 1
   Step 1: Open the widget settings

   In TimeWell, go to Settings > Desktop widgets.

2. 2
   Step 2: Choose Habits and a size

   Small shows one habit's last seven weeks, medium one habit with its streak and about three months, and large up to four of today's habits with their graphs. Select Add to desktop.

3. 3
   Step 3: Place it

   Drag it where you want it; click it to open the Habits page. Right-click to resize or remove it, or, on a small or medium widget, to choose which habit it shows under Habit.

The widget sits on the wallpaper beneath your windows and costs about 2 MB of memory. For the other widgets and what Windows offers, see desktop widgets for Windows 11.

What TimeWell won't do: it doesn't sync to your phone, and it doesn't run on a Mac, iPhone or Android. Your habits, like everything TimeWell records, stay in a small database on your PC and are never uploaded; the privacy policy has the details. It is free for 7 days with every habit, then TimeWell Free keeps one habit of your choice going, and Pro, a one-time payment with no subscription for up to two PCs, keeps them all.

• Start with one or two habits. Each new habit competes for the same attention. Add a third once the first two feel routine.
• Make it small enough for your worst day. Ten minutes of language practice you do daily beats an hour you keep skipping.
• Tie it to an existing routine. Pick a cue that already happens every day: after breakfast, when you sit down at your desk, before you shut the laptop. The study above had people repeat each habit in the same situation for a reason.
• Do it early, and choose it yourself. Morning habits and self-chosen ones both tended to be stronger in the 2024 review. Track what you care about, not what you think you should.
• Give long habits some structure. For an hour of study, a Pomodoro timer on Windows breaks it into 25-minute rounds with short breaks.
• Swap, don't just cut. If you want less time on a site, give that time to a measured habit you'd rather build. Our guide on how to reduce screen time on your PC has more ideas.