3 apps that I actually use to keep my New Year’s resolutions

If you’re like me, it’s extremely helpful to visually track these goals, write them down, and see the progress you’re making along the way. I’ve tried many versions of this over the years, but in 2025, I used three apps that I found super useful, each with a unique one approximation.

Here are my three favorite apps that will actually help you stick to your resolutions.

The advantage of HabitKit is its simplicity, which is probably why it was the easiest app for me to use consistently. After you enter your habits and goals, each gets its own contribution chart, with a grid of squares with each square representing a day. Popularized by GitHub, this chart is extremely useful for visualizing your progress and provides an overview of your entire year.

While simple in its approach, HabitKit also manages to pack in a range of features and customization options. Adding a habit is simple: give it a title, choose a color and a symbol or emoji that represents it, and you’re done. If you want to go even further, you can set a streak goal, add reminders, and create a category to group certain habits in one view. Importantly, you can also adjust how many completions you want to achieve each day, and similar to GitHub’s approach, the color intensity of the day square increases with the number of completions in a day.

HabitKit also has very good analytics. It’s easy to lose track of your progress over time, especially when daily progress seems small. But if you check the analytics every now and then, you’ll realize that your little victories add up.

Pro tip: use HabitKit widgets! You can place a habit’s contribution graph directly on your home screen. In addition to reminder notifications, this is a great way to always keep your progress in mind.

Remember Tamagotchi? Finch is essentially a modern version of that, but your little digital pet will only grow and thrive as you check in every day and make progress on your real-life goals. It’s a truly unique look at building habits.

Finch focuses more on self-care and improving your mental health, suggesting habits like drinking water or deep breathing throughout the day. You can of course use Finch like any other habit tracker, but it’s nice to have a place that isn’t focused on work all the time. This app invites you to slow down and enjoy life a little more while appreciating the little things. If you ask me, many of us could use more of that these days.

I could write a whole book about the gamification in this app, but let’s save that for another day. You can customize your pet and its home almost endlessly, and you can even add your real-life friends to the app. Every bit of progress your pet makes comes from you checking off your self-improvement goals. In a world of lifeless productivity apps, this one doesn’t feel like a productivity app at all, yet you’ll be surprised at how cunningly it helps you remember to drink water and tidy up the house every day.

Google Calendar (or any calendar app for that matter) can easily be turned into quite the habit tracker, especially now that Google Tasks is built right into the Calendar app. I use Calendar for some recurring work-related goals, but generally I stick with the previous two options for most of my tracking.

To make this method work, I recommend creating a new list in Tasks specifically for habit tracking. This way, everything is in one place and not spread across different lists, and your daily tasks don’t get in the way. For each habit, set the frequency at which you want to repeat it, and use reminders to keep it top of mind.

The main advantage of this approach is that it is available almost everywhere. While the previous two apps are mobile-only, you can access both Tasks and Calendar on mobile devices and desktops. Plus, your scheduled tasks will appear in your calendar view, making it easy to see where your habits fit in throughout the day.

The main disadvantage of this approach is the lack of built-in progress tracking. No analytics, no streak indicator to keep you going, no way to see how often you complete a habit. This requires more discipline than other apps, but the added benefit is that every phone has this built in from the start.

Find out what works for you

Habit tracking apps are a dime a dozen, so you need to find what works for you. It’s easy to fall into the trap of constantly finding new ones and constantly wasting time setting everything up only to move on to the next one – I’m speaking from experience here – so when you find one that does the job, stick with it. Give it at least until the end of 2026, and you’ll be surprised how far it gets you.