How I Track My Habits Automatically

Building a habit is hard, but tracking those habits is even harder. So many times I started tracking my habits only to fail later. So I decided to automate this process and track my habits automatically using the Apple Shortcuts app and Cloudflare Workers.

For this, I created a new page /habits/ where everyone can see my habits and my discipline. I hope this creates more transparency, accountability, and gamifies the process. What I did is simple: I created an API for habit tracking and used the Apple Shortcuts app to mark habits as complete.

How I Track Each Habit

Let’s start with 7hr Sleep. To track this, I created an automation that runs when I wake up in the morning. It collects sleep data from Apple Health (which is already tracked with my Apple Watch) and checks if last night’s sleep was more than 7 hours. If so, it marks the habit as completed through the API.

For workout tracking, I created another automation in the Shortcuts app that triggers when a “New Workout Started” event occurs on my Apple Watch. It then marks the workout habit as completed using the API.

Tracking my reading habit was a little tricky since I read physical books and I’m not a big fan of ebooks. I was stuck on this for a while, but then I got an idea. I have an NFC card, and the Apple Shortcuts app has a trigger that starts an automation when a specific NFC card is tapped on an iPhone. So I started using that NFC card as my bookmark. previously, I used a normal piece of paper for this purpose. For this, you can use any NFC tag or any unused ATM card, as most cards now have NFC built in. We don’t need to program these NFC tags; the automation triggers just by touching the NFC card, that’s all. For deep work habit tracking, I’m using a similar approach with an NFC sticker. You can get these on Amazon for around ₹150 for 10 pieces.

For community tracking, I created a Cloudflare Worker that checks my community profile and looks for any new posts on that day. If there’s a new post, it marks the habit as completed; otherwise, it’s considered incomplete.

I’ve been using this method for the last three days, and it feels great. I just need to complete the task, and it automatically gets tracked. Since it’s publicly available, I feel more accountable. I hope this will help me become better and more disciplined. I’ll update this post later to share my progress.