New year, new habits
I've always liked the idea of tracking habits. A couple years ago, I had a large whiteboard and I would draw a calendar and put an X on every day where I wrote some code towards a side project.
When I needed the whiteboard space, I switched to marking an X on calendars printed out on paper. At one point, I had over a year's worth of calendars hanging on the wall. It was super gratifying because I got to see all the months of progress stacked up next to each other.
Today, I don't have that same habit tracking setup anymore. And this year I realized I've been missing it.
I initially thought about hanging calendars on the wall again, but I felt like there was a better way to do it now.
So, I looked into various mobile apps that do habit tracking. They work fine, but they add yet another thing to sign into. I already feel burnt out from signing into apps all day and spreading my attention across so many platforms.
Then I thought: what about Obsidian? I already spend time every day in that app. I write a daily note every day with my tasks and scratchpad thoughts for the day. So why not add my habit tracking to that?
I looked for plugins that could do habit tracking. I found a couple (Contribution Graph, Tracker, etc). These seemed great, but they store your habits in daily notes. And since the data was stored in each note, I couldn't click on the calendar view and mark days as done. So marking previous days meant digging through old daily notes. That's annoying.
So I decided "What's the easiest way to build this myself?". I settled on building a simple web app hooked up to a Postgres database that I could embed in Obsidian via an iframe.
That code is available publicly on Github.
Long-term, I could see this information living in my daily notes. It should be possible to go back to old notes and automatically mark them with a property without doing it manually. But I didn't want to go through that hassle, so I'll let somebody else figure that out. For now, this works for my needs.
My habits for 2026
So let's talk about the habits I'm tracking this year!
I have 3 main habits I want to track for myself this year.
1. Running and Skiing
I don't have specific goals here, but it's something I like to track. It feels good to know when my last run was and to see how frequently I'm training. It helps me stay motivated and judge how hard I should push myself.
2. Lifting
I've been going to the gym consistently for a couple years now. I've made a couple apps to help track my workouts. Adding this to the habit calendar is just one more layer on top. It's an easy way to see how frequent I train. I already know I go consistently, but having it on a calendar helps me feel like I'm making progress. And that matters. Knowing I've been consistent for a month gives me confidence to push myself and lift heavier.
3. Building in Public
This is the big one. And the reason I made this calendar. I define "building in public" as shipping something that's visible to others. Originally I had this habit labeled as "coding" or "side projects" but I realized that's not the metric I care about. Growth, and by extension how much I can gain traction, is the metric I care about. And the actionable way to gain traction is to spend time every day driving awareness. So that's what I'm tracking.
A final note
I want to talk about this last goal a little more.
I'm building a new app called QueryBear, where you can talk to your database like a human. As I build new features, I find myself doing a lot of work that ends up being wasted. This is common when building anything. But, it feels like wasted time. It doesn't end up in the product. It doesn't end up in marketing. But it's also a necessary part of building anything.
So my goal is to share those dead ends as they happen. At least try to create some value from them.
Also, it's 2026. With AI, it's easy to ship new stuff. I should be shipping a bunch of free little widgets like this habit tracker. I build these things anyways, but I don't usually share them publicly. That needs to change. Not just for other people, but for myself so I can get used to promoting something and putting my name behind it.
So yeah, I'm excited for this year. I'm excited for the habits I'm tracking. And I'm excited to see what I can build this year!
--- Spencer