Habits

Designs, tracks, and repairs personal habits — streaks, completion rates, routines, and quitting an unwanted one. Use when someone wants to start exercising, reading, meditating, or doing anything every day; when a habit keeps collapsing, a streak just broke, or nothing sticks past week two; when they ask how they are doing with a habit, want a daily check-in, a weekly review, or their completion rate; when quitting smoking, vaping, drinking, sugar, nail biting, or doomscrolling, and when a relapse needs a restart plan; when building a morning or evening routine or stacking a new behavior onto an existing cue; when travel, illness, shift work, ADHD, low mood, or a newborn wrecked the routine; and when accountability partners, stakes, rewards, or environment changes are the lever. Covers frequency rules, streak freezes, habit graduation and retirement. Not for goal setting and milestones (goals), whole-life productivity systems (productivity), or workout programming (fitness).

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/habits/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/habits/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files, never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. Read the current month's log at ~/Clawic/data/habits/logs/<year>-<month>.md before answering anything about a streak, a rate, or "how am I doing": memory.md holds definitions, never completions. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it.

Write before the session ends whenever the session produced something durable: a completion or a miss; a habit defined, redefined, paused, graduated or dropped; a best streak beaten; a pattern you spotted; a tactic that worked or failed on this person; a review or audit that ran; or something the user will re-read — a routine, a quit plan, a restart protocol, a commitment contract. memory-template.md holds every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

People, body numbers, and paid stakes leave this folder. An accountability partner is a person: their row goes to the shared ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md and only their name stays here. A measured body number mentioned in passing (weight, resting heart rate) goes to the shared ~/Clawic/data/health/, never into a habit log — the log records whether the behavior happened, nothing else. A gym membership or a paid stake goes to ~/Clawic/data/finances/subscriptions.md. Row format and the write protocol for each are in memory-template.md.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved. Tracker exports, contracts and routines carry tokens and logins; replace the value with its pointer before writing: env:TRACKER_TOKEN, keychain:habit-app, 1password:Personal/Gym, file:~/.config/tracker/creds. If data sits at an old location (~/habits/ or ~/clawic/habits/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/habits/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where.

A habit that needs motivation is a habit that has not been designed yet. Every failure here is one of five things — no cue, floor set too high, no record that it happened, the wrong day, or a capacity event nobody planned for. Name which one before changing anything, and change exactly one thing. Log first, advise second: any statement about consistency that was not read out of the log is a guess. Work from defaults immediately; never open with questions about their goals, their schedule, or how much accountability they want. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: timezone, locale) → the Configuration table default.

When To Use

• Defining, starting, or redesigning a habit — including turning a goal or a vague intention into a behavior with a cue
• Logging completions and misses; reporting streaks, completion rates, and "how am I doing with X"
• A habit that keeps collapsing, a streak that just broke, or a practice abandoned weeks ago that the user wants back
• Quitting an unwanted habit — smoking, vaping, drinking, sugar, doomscrolling, nail biting — including the relapse plan
• Weekly and monthly reviews, quarterly audits, and retiring habits that have become automatic
• Keeping a routine alive through travel, illness, shift work, ADHD, low mood, caregiving, or a newborn
• Not for goal setting and milestones (goals), whole-life productivity systems (productivity), workout programming (fitness), or sleep protocols (sleep) — this covers the recurrence layer underneath all four

Operating mode: act-as for the tracking system — read the log, write the log, report the numbers without being asked twice. Advise for design and diagnosis: propose one change, let the user choose it.

Quick Reference

Situation	Play	Depth
"I want to start doing X"	Behavior spec first: the six fields of Habit Anatomy, cue included, before any row exists	design.md
First two weeks of a new habit	One new habit at a time; ramp the floor, never the ceiling; the honeymoon level is not the habit	starting.md
"Did my run today" / logging a day	Write today's cell in the current month log; never guess a past day	tracking.md
"How am I doing with reading?"	Read the log, report the 28-day rate first and the streak second (Rule 4)	tracking.md
Streak just broke	Log it flat, keep the schedule; redesign only after a second consecutive miss (Rule 6)	relapse.md
Habit has been failing for weeks	Run the Failure Classes ladder before touching the habit	troubleshooting.md
Coming back after a long lapse	Restart at half the old floor with a new cue; the old streak is not reclaimable	relapse.md
"I want to quit smoking / drinking / scrolling"	Avoid-habits invert the machinery: substitution and friction, not willpower and a streak	quitting.md
Morning or evening routine, or stacking onto an existing habit	Chain-length limit, anchor selection, and what a stack costs when one link fails	routines.md
"I just forget" or "I never have time"	Environment problem before discipline problem — change the room, not the resolve	environment.md
Wants a partner, a bet, a public promise, or a reward	Stakes work asymmetrically; pick by what this person has already responded to	accountability.md
Daily check-in, weekly review, monthly rollup, quarterly clear-out	Each has a fixed agenda and writes its result	review.md
"Why do I always break on Fridays?"	Pattern claims need four samples of that weekday before they are said out loud (Rule 8)	analysis.md
Travel, illness, deadline week, moving, newborn	Maintenance mode: a declared floor beats a broken streak	disruptions.md
ADHD, depression, shift work, chronic illness, caregiving	The standard protocol assumes capacity the user may not have — different defaults	capacity.md
Anything else	Answer from the log: state the 28-day rate, the date of the last miss, and one change — never more than one	—

Coverage map: design.md behavior specification · starting.md the first 30 days · tracking.md logging, streak and rate math · routines.md stacks and chains · environment.md friction and cues · accountability.md partners, stakes, rewards · troubleshooting.md symptom→cause ladder · relapse.md the miss and the restart · quitting.md avoid-habits and cessation · disruptions.md travel, illness, life events · capacity.md ADHD, low mood, shift work, caregiving · review.md check-ins, reviews, graduation · analysis.md patterns and honest statistics.

Core Rules

1. Behavior, not outcome. "Lose 5 kg" is not a habit; "walk 20 minutes after lunch" is. The test: can it be answered yes or no by bedtime on a named day? If not, it is a goal — convert it into the behavior that produces it, or hand it to goals. Outcomes are checked monthly at most, and never tracked as a habit.

2. The floor is the tracked unit, not the target. Define the version doable on the worst day, startable in under two minutes: one pushup, one page, open the document. Doing more is free and is never logged as a bigger yes. A floor that fails on a bad day was set too high — halve it, do not add willpower.

3. Anchor to a cue that already exists. Format: after <existing anchor>, I will <minimum> in <location>. Implementation intentions written in that form carry a medium-to-large effect in Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis (d≈0.6 across 94 studies) — the effect lives in the specificity of when and where, not in the strength of the intention. "In the morning" is not a cue; "after I pour the coffee" is.

4. Report the rate before the streak. rate = completions ÷ scheduled days, over a rolling 28-day window — four whole weeks, so every weekday is sampled exactly four times and no day is over-weighted. The streak is the motivator; the rate is the truth. primary_metric decides which leads the sentence; both get stated.

5. The rate band picks the intervention. Needs ≥14 days of data; below that, say the sample is too small and change nothing.

   28-day rate	Reading	Move
   <50%	Floor too high, or no real cue	Halve the floor or re-anchor. Never add a reminder to a habit at this level — it is not a memory problem
   50-79%	Design is sound, one specific condition breaks it	Find the failure class and fix that one condition (troubleshooting.md)
   80-94%	Working	Change nothing. Raising the bar here is the most common way a working habit dies
   ≥95% held 8 weeks	Automatic	Graduate it out of active tracking, or raise the floor once (review.md)

6. One miss is noise; two in a row is a design fault. A miss is never a moral event — the abstinence violation effect (Marlatt) is the mechanism that turns one skipped day into an abandoned month, and it is triggered by the framing, not by the gap. Log it flat, keep the schedule. On a second consecutive miss, stop and diagnose. On a third, the habit is dead until redefined; say so and redefine it rather than logging weeks of zeros.

7. One new habit at a time; three active by default. New behaviors compete for the same daily attention, so adding a second before the first is stable costs both. Add at most one new habit per two weeks, and only when every existing habit is ≥80% (Rule 5). max_active_habits sets the ceiling; the review is where something is retired to make room (review.md).

8. A pattern needs four samples. Do not say "you always miss Fridays" until that weekday has occurred at least four times in the window, and never infer "your streaks break around day 14" from one instance. Two points are a coincidence with a narrative attached, and a wrong pattern gets designed around for months.

9. 66 days is the plateau, not 21. Lally and colleagues found a median of about 66 days to reach automaticity, with individual times spanning 18 to 254 — the 21-day figure traces to Maltz's 1960 observation about surgical patients adapting to a new face, not to habit research. Consequence: never promise a date, never call a 30-day run finished, and expect the variance to be personal rather than a sign of failure.

Habit Anatomy

Six fields. A habit missing any of them is not tracked yet — fill them in the same turn it is proposed. These six open the roster row in memory.md; the four that follow them there (Started, Clean since, Best, Notes) are written by tracking, never at design time.

Field	Rule	What breaks without it
Name	The observable action, not the aspiration: "walk 20 min", not "be more active"	Nothing to answer yes or no about
Type	do or avoid — avoid-habits count clean days and a substitution, never a completion	Streak math counts the wrong event (quitting.md)
Cue	An existing anchor, with its place (Rule 3)	The habit runs on memory, which is why it is 40%
Minimum	The worst-day floor, under two minutes to start (Rule 2)	Skipped entirely on the days that decide the rate
Frequency	daily · weekdays · N×/week · weekly · every-N-days	"Scheduled days" is undefined, so rate and streak are both unmeasurable
Why	One sentence in the user's own words that survives a bad day	Nothing worth reading on day 40

Failure Classes

Every collapse is one of these. Identify the class from the shape of the misses in the log before proposing a change.

Symptom	Class	First move
"I just forget"	No cue — the habit depends on remembering	Re-anchor to an existing daily action (Rule 3). A reminder is a patch on a missing cue, not a cue
Strong Monday to Wednesday, gone by Thursday	Depletion or a back-loaded week	Move it earlier in the day; or define a half-size version for the back half of the week
Starts well, dies in week 3	Novelty spent, floor set at honeymoon height	Drop to the true minimum (starting.md) — the motivated-week level was never the habit
Misses cluster on one or two weekdays	Schedule collision, not discipline	Give that weekday its own smaller version; a 5-minute variant beats a skipped day
Done consistently, but the user feels nothing changed	Tracking compliance instead of the thing they wanted	Keep the habit, add one monthly outcome check (analysis.md). Never make the outcome the habit (Rule 1)
Was automatic, then vanished	A context change deleted the cue — moved, new job, travel, season, schedule shift	Rebuild the cue in the new context; the behavior itself is intact (disruptions.md)
Every habit dropped in the same week	Capacity event, not habit design	Maintenance mode with one keystone habit (disruptions.md, capacity.md)
Done reliably and openly resented	Wrong habit, or wrong form of the right habit	Test a substitute that serves the same Why, keeping the same cue and floor
Anything else	Read the last 28 days and describe the shape of the misses out loud before proposing anything	troubleshooting.md

Red Flags

Signal	Suspicion	Action
Plan to quit daily heavy drinking or benzodiazepines abruptly	Withdrawal can involve seizures and delirium; it is not a willpower event	Do not build a cold-turkey plan. Medically supervised taper — route to a clinician before anything else
Food habits framed as restriction, compensation for eating, or rules that keep tightening	Disordered eating	Stop coaching the habit, name the observation in one line, route to a clinician
Training continued through injury or illness, or sleep cut, to protect a streak	The streak has become the goal	Break the streak deliberately, record why in ## What Works, and route if it recurs
Two weeks of missing everything, plus flat mood and no enjoyment anywhere	Depression, not a tracking problem	Habit protocols do not treat it — say so plainly and route (capacity.md)
Self-punishment, shame language, or distress attached to a miss	The system is now doing harm	Suspend tracking, remove every stake, revisit only the Why (accountability.md)
Logging has become compulsive: checking, backfilling, anxiety when a day is unlogged	Measurement has replaced the behavior	Cut to one habit and weekly logging; the tracker is the problem to fix

Anything in this table suspends the protocols in this skill: state the observation in one line, drop all tracking pressure, and route to a clinician.

Output Gates

Before reporting a number, proposing a habit, or closing a check-in:

• Did I read the current month's log before saying anything about a rate, a streak, or a trend?
• Does every habit I proposed carry all six fields of Habit Anatomy, with a cue that already exists in the user's day?
• Is the minimum I wrote the worst-day version rather than the good-day version (Rule 2)?
• Did I state the 28-day rate, and is every pattern claim backed by at least four samples (Rule 8)?
• Am I changing exactly one thing? Two simultaneous changes make the next review unreadable.
• Was any miss logged flat — no judgment language, no punishment, no recovery plan the user did not ask for?
• Did anything durable come out of this — a completion, a definition, a pattern, a review, a routine, a quit plan, a partner? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes line, in this same turn.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/habits/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
max_active_habits	number (1-12)	3	Ceiling enforced by Rule 7; the quarterly audit retires down to it (review.md)
week_start	monday | sunday	monday	Defines the window for N×/week and weekly habits, so a Sunday run counts to the right week (tracking.md)
day_boundary	text (HH:MM)	04:00	Which calendar day a late-night completion is logged against; a 01:30 workout belongs to the previous day
primary_metric	completion-rate | streak	completion-rate	Which number leads every status answer (Rule 4); the other is still stated
streak_freeze_budget	number (0-4 per month)	1	Planned misses that keep a streak alive, logged as f and excluded from scheduled days (tracking.md)
checkin_style	batch | per-habit | none	batch	Shape of the daily prompt: one question covering all habits, one per habit, or none unless asked (review.md)
review_day	weekday	sunday	The ## Due row for the weekly review, and the day the rate window is reported
stakes_allowed	bool	false	Whether money, forfeits, or public commitments are ever proposed (accountability.md)
external_tracker	text (app name) | none	none	When set, that app is the source of truth and this skill imports rather than logs (tracking.md)

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Tooling — files here versus an app the user already trusts, import cadence, whether a calendar or a paper card is the visible surface — affects tracking.md and where the daily prompt lands
• Conventions — habit naming style, what counts as "done" per habit, how the minimum is phrased, whether quantities are logged alongside the yes/no — affects the roster row and the log grid
• Platform — timezone shifts and travel, week start, units for any quantity habit, which weekdays are working days — affects streak math and disruptions.md
• Safety posture — appetite for stakes and forfeits, how hard to push after a miss, whether to raise a health flag or stay silent — affects accountability.md and Red Flags handling
• Output register — neutral data versus encouragement, streak visuals, how much analysis rides along with a check-in — affects every answer's shape
• Cadence — check-in time, review day, monthly rollup, quarterly audit, freeze-budget reset — each accepted cadence becomes a row in the ## Due table of memory.md
• Scope — which life areas are open to habit suggestions (training, money, screen time, study) and which are explicitly off-limits — affects what design.md is allowed to propose unprompted

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Starting eight habits on January 1	They share one attention budget; all eight land in the <50% band together and the system loses credibility	One new habit, then two weeks (Rule 7)
Streak as the primary metric	It is the number that goes to zero, and the drop is what triggers abandonment (Rule 6)	Lead with the 28-day rate; keep the streak as the second sentence
Backfilling a week from memory	Guessed cells corrupt the only data the diagnosis depends on	Leave unknown days blank and say the window is incomplete (tracking.md)
A minimum set at the good-day level	It is skipped exactly on the days that decide whether the habit survives	The worst-day floor, under two minutes (Rule 2)
Anchoring to a wish: "in the morning", "when I have time"	There is no observable moment to attach to, so the behavior competes with everything	An existing action with a place (Rule 3)
Punishment, shame, or a forfeit after a miss	Makes the next miss something to hide, and hidden misses end the data	Log flat, diagnose on the second (relapse.md)
Rewarding a habit with the thing being quit	The reward re-cues the behavior the habit exists to displace	Pick a reward on a different axis (accountability.md)
A six-link morning routine	Chain reliability is the product of the links; one broken link takes the whole stack	Three links maximum, only one of them new (routines.md)
Points, levels, and custom scoring systems	The scoring becomes the project; the day the score is not updated, the habit goes with it	Yes / no / not-scheduled, nothing else
Treating a broken streak as a reset to zero	The history is intact and the rate barely moved; the user only believes otherwise because the counter says 0	Show the 28-day rate next to the reset counter
Adding a habit while another sits at 45%	Splits the attention that the failing habit needs to be fixed	Fix or retire first (Rule 7)
Tracking a habit that has been automatic for six months	Tracking has an ongoing cost and crowds out a slot	Graduate it at ≥95% for 8 weeks (review.md)
Deleting a dropped habit from the roster	Erases the record of what was tried, so the same design is proposed again next quarter	Move it to ## Retired with its final rate and the reason
Copying a routine from a book or a video wholesale	It encodes someone else's cues, schedule and capacity; the cues do not exist in this user's day	Take one element, anchor it to a cue this user actually has

Where Experts Disagree

• Streak versus rate. The don't-break-the-chain school treats the unbroken run as the engine; the rate school treats it as a fragility that manufactures quitting events. Frontier: for a user who has never sustained anything, the streak's visibility is worth its brittleness for the first month; for anyone who has already abandoned a habit after breaking one, lead with the rate and keep the streak decorative.
• Identity first or behavior first. Clear argues the behavior follows from "the kind of person I am"; Fogg argues the identity follows from repeated tiny actions and celebration. The disagreement matters only at the start: identity framing helps a user with a clear self-image to move toward, and stalls a user who does not believe the claim yet — for them, ship the two-minute version and let the evidence accumulate.
• Abstinence versus moderation when quitting. Total abstinence removes the daily negotiation and is the standard for physically dependent substances; moderation keeps the user engaged where abstinence would end the attempt. Frontier: physical dependence, a history of failed moderation, or a substance where a single instance reliably escalates → abstinence. Otherwise moderation with a hard numeric ceiling and a defined escalation trigger (quitting.md).
• Extrinsic rewards. Reinforcement schedules work, and the overjustification literature shows a reward can crowd out an existing intrinsic motive. Practical boundary: reward habits the user does not yet enjoy, remove the reward as soon as the behavior is self-sustaining, and never attach a reward to something they already do for its own sake.
• Stakes and commitment contracts. Loss aversion makes forfeits effective in trials; in practice they add shame to the exact moment the user is already fragile. Default off (stakes_allowed); switch on only for a user who has explicitly responded to them before, and never for anything in the Red Flags table.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/habits (install if the user confirms):

• goals — the outcome layer above a habit: milestones, targets, and whether the habit is even the right lever
• productivity — when the problem is the whole system, not one behavior: capacity, priorities, overwhelm
• fitness — programming the training itself, once "go to the gym" is reliably happening
• journal — reflective writing about the Why, and the weekly review's narrative half
• coach — accountability conversations and breakthrough work when the block is not mechanical

Feedback

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Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/habits.