The Atomic Habit Tracker | Chapter-8

Published in

Heptagon

4 min readMar 19, 2019

In “How to Build a Chrome Extension” series, we will learn how to build a Chrome Extension from scratch and also learn how to add some basic customizations to these extensions. Note: Feel free to skip to any chapter by clicking on the links provided at the end of this post.

For now, here are the contents of Chapter 8: The Atomic Habit Tracker.

A little bit about Habits
Habit Cycle
Atomic Habit Tracker — Chrome Extension
Summary
Chapter Navigation

What are Habits?

Habits are nothing but auto-scripts that your brain writes to reduce the cognitive load on repetitive tasks. Meaning, your brain is smart enough to pre-program the tasks that you do often so that your brain can concentrate on new and different things. When you execute habits, you’re using less will power as you’re relying on your systems to do something. Your brain now has more energy to address other tasks.

Habits are a compound interest of self-improvement and small changes (incrementally) can result in massive results.

Imagine this, if you improve yourself just 1% every day, at the end of the year you would be 37.5% improved or the same could go for going worse. This 1% choice seems insignificant today but compound over a time period which people generally don’t see it in action since it’s a long term effect.

The Habit Cycle

The habit cycle includes Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. Let’s say you are going out with your friends for some beers. The Cue here would be friends (can also be time or location or emotion). The Craving would be Beers. The Response would be drinking and the Reward would be the conversations that you have with your friends.

Good habits go a long way. To make good habits stay, you can follow the O.A.E.S. (Obvious, Attractive, Easy, Satisfying) rule and break a bad habit you can follow the I.U.D.U. the rule which is the opposite of the O.A.E.S. rule. Here make your Cues ‘Invisible’, your Cravings ‘Unattractive’, your Response ‘Difficult’ and your Reward ‘Unsatisfying’.

But whatever be the habit, good or bad, it needs to be tracked. Checking off a habit each day and keeping a log of the progress really improves the motivation and ability to complete or remove that habit each day. That’s exactly why we have built this habit tracker in the form of a Chrome Extension that will help you easily rectify, understand and bring in improvements to your habits.

Atomic Habit Tracker — Chrome Extension

The Atomic Habit Tracker keeps a log of your daily habits with the help of a Simple Chrome Extension which we have learned to create in this series.

This Chrome Extension will ask you to enter your basic information, like your name, email id and the link of the spreadsheet where you want to save your habits.

Whenever you open the browser, the extension loads up automatically. The Extension reminds you to log your habits or routines every ten minutes (can be customized) with a popup on your screen.

The popup has two fields. One is the category field which is the dropdown list and the other is an input field.

The category section field (selection box) has two options, Professional and Personal. Whenever you select an option another select box appears where you can add subcategories with respect to the previously selected option.

Then you can leave a comment on that particular task that is selected and just press update. Data will be written to the spreadsheet based on the timeslot.

Keep a log of every habit with this simple habit tracker chrome extension. Be it getting rid of a long bad habit or cultivating a new habit, keep this tracker in your browser to keep track of every habit.,