What my habit tracker app says about me

I have been using the Streaks app for many years to encourage me to stick to various daily habits.

I’ll admit upfront that I’m terrible at sticking to many habits, so in some ways the app is my own hall of shame which sometimes shows me how poorly I’ve been keeping to my habits.

The Streaks app lets you create a page of up to six habits you want to track (this can include negative habits such as ‘don’t do something each day’). You can have multiple pages and I am currently tracking 15 different items. Some of these are long standing and some are fairly recent additions.

My habits

Streaks app - first screen

Streaks app - second screen

Streaks app - third screen

As of 26 August 2026, here are the habits that I’ve been tracking along with details of my current %completion rate for 2026 (hopefully these numbers will be higher by the time anyone is reading this):

1. Floss - 74% completion rate - need to do this twice a day to count as a completion 

2. Eat fruit - 56% - one piece a day will be enough to tick this one off (one of my weakest habits)

3. Meditate for at least three minutes - 76% - I try to do this for five minutes each morning

4. Perform morning stretches - 90% - I’m getting old and am trying to gain some (any) suppleness in my body

5. Exercise - 15% - this is a weekly goal, need to tick it off three times to count

6. Log stats - 30% - what can be better than logging stats each day around various other things you want to monitor? Well, how about making that stat logging a habit! 

7. Post on Mastodon - 74% - trying to be more social this year, need to post three times a week to make this count

8. Post on LinkedIn - 91% - like above, but this target is at least once a week

9. Write blog post - 100% - I used to blog so much but this has proven harder in recent years. So in 2026, I’m aiming for one post per month as a minimum (this is possibly my most successful habit, 13 posts in eight months so far)

10. Journal - 35% - a relatively new addition, trying to use Apple’s journal app more

11. Read - 72% - the most obvious one on this list maybe. Even 10 minutes is enough to tick this one off.

12. Create note in Digital Garden - 100% - I’m currently exploring the concepts of digital gardening. At the current time, I’m just trying to collect notes, at least one each day. It’s this habit that is responsible for writing a note which led to this very blog post!

13. Listen to music - 20% - this shouldn’t be so hard but I sometimes realise that I’ve not been mindfully listening to music very much. The aim of this recent addition to Streaks app is to listen to at least 15 minutes of music, three times a week. It can be background music but I want to feel that I’m vaguely paying attention to it.

14. Listen to one complete album -  26% - this has been another new-ish addition to my set of weekly targets.  

15. Play piano - 26% - just need to spend at least 15 minutes twice a week. Note: I don’t really play piano, I just map guitar chords to the piano and vamp around a bit (I don’t have left/right hand independence).

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The one habit I never need to track

There is one daily habit which is absent from this list of Streaks habits. Maybe this is because it has become so engrained in my daily routine, I don’t need much of a reminder to do it.

Every day I try to walk at least 10,000 steps. I’ve been using the Pedometer++ app to track this for many years (since 2014). At the time I made the screen grab below, I had hit a 776 day streak!

Does any of this help me?

I often fall off the habit-tracking band wagon, but there are times where I see myself failing to achieve something and that does shame me into doing better.

I also have a daily reminder in my reminders app to look at my progress in Streaks and that now often leads to a flurry of activity between 9-10pm to tick off some items.

Habit tracking is not for everyone, but you might want to give it a try. There are a lot of apps out there to do this, but you can also use a simple analogue approach of crossing off days on a calendar/wallchart. This has become known in some circles as the Seinfeld Strategy…something that Jerry Seinfeld has publicly disowned calling it 'the dumbest non-idea that was not mine'.

By 'eck, it's worse than Barnsley: my first website (from 1997)

I started my PhD in late 1996, at a time when creating a website was a very rare thing to do. For instance, this was around the same time that the BBC had only just launched their own website (and they were ahead of many other organisations). 

There was no Squarespace or Wix at this time and websites were nearly all created by writing HTML by hand into a text editor. I was already a little aware of the nature of websites because during my Masters degree (in bioinformatics) someone’s final MSc project was simply to build a single webpage of bioinformatics links. It seems laughable now that this could be a project suitable for a Masters degree, but it really was a new frontier at the time requiring skills that most people just didn’t have.

Version 1 

Because my PhD was in a technical field (Computational Biology) and because I shared a computer lab with colleagues who had already tinkered with creating their own webpage, it was a natural step for me to have a go at it.

So in early 1997, I started building my first ever website which I called “By ‘eck, it’s worse than Barnsley”. This was a subtle reference to an obscure short film which remains one of the greatest pieces of televisual work ever filmed.

This is the oldest version of my website that I could find on archive.org (captured October 1997):

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A classic 1990s element of this website is the web counter (showing 7,088 hits on this visit). I’m not quite sure why I wanted to be so apologetic with the subheading (‘I’m really very sorry’), but that was what I went with.

The very first (and short-lived) version of this site — not captured by archive.org — featured a NASA moon image as the background. This loaded perfectly fine for me, when sitting at a computer that was in the same room as our web server, but I subsequently discovered that the page would take minutes to completely load for anyone else not on the same local network.

The website was built by typing HTML into a text file. That was about all you could do in 1997! Over time I learnt about techniques such as iFrames which let me have a fixed left-hand navigation menu and then load the content of each link into an iFrame on the right-hand side. This meant that the URL of the site never changed.

Over time, I found new pages to add to the sidebar including an early Perl-script generated page that highlighted the ‘Top 40’ pages on the web server. This was something you could do quite easily when the web server was running on the same computer that you logged into to do your work. Apache’s web server software would create an ever-growing access_log file which was perfect fodder to be mined with a Perl script. 

During the first year or two of my PhD, the server hosted a few webpages from other PhD students and a very rudimentary lab website. In time, I used it to build a website for the band that I was in (‘Bring me sunshine - home of the Sunflowers’) as well as a website for the Department of Genetics (in which our lab was based).

Version 2

I changed the look of the website at some point in 1998 or 1999 and ended up with the following design (although this capture is from February 2007, the site was effectively unchanged for many years):

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The web counter had been removed by this point, but my site’s name stayed the same. I had also stopped using iFrames so that each page could be accessed on its own URL. The main structure of this page is an HTML table.

The ‘arrow’ (six dots and a > character) below the word ‘Barnsley’ was an animated GIF that I had made (click the archive.org link above to see it in action). I can’t remember what tool I would have used to make an animated GIF at this time…there wouldn’t have been a lot of easy tools to use. I created the UK map image by digitally tracking around an existing map as I recall. Clicking the map would take you to a page I made with information about Barnsley.

The last modified date on the above screengrab indicates that the page had effectively been unchanged for over four years. This was because I had finished my PhD and was on my third post-PhD job by this point. It’s kind of crazy that I still had login access to the server from my PhD. 

I made one subsequent change to this site to really flag that this site was no longer active and the last capture of the site by archive.org is on February 2008, so that’s a good 10-year run for my first website! 

Thinking back to this site, I have fond memories of the sheer fun of building a website at that time. I like how I had settled on a clean, white background aesthetic, which has sort of become my go-to style for most websites that I’ve created since then.

Search traffic is collapsing, direct traffic is booming: here's my data

Love it or hate it, AI is having a big impact on the world. If you are involved in managing a website, you probably have noticed the indirect effect of AI in your website analytics data. One obvious way that this manifests itself is in declining levels of overall traffic.

Tools like Google’s AI search summaries are obliterating traffic for many websites as people find all the information they need without needing to click through (and that’s assuming that there is even a link to click on). A Pew Research Center study from last July found that users were much less likely to click on links when their Google search results had an AI summary compared to search results without one. 

Direct traffic

In a blog post from January, I wrote about the different ‘buckets’ of traffic that website analytics platforms record. This includes obvious things like ‘social media’ and ‘search engine’ traffic, but also the broader (and somewhat nebulous) category of ‘direct’ traffic. Historically, this was really referring to people who went directly to your website by using browser bookmarks, clicking on links in emails, or even just by typing a web address.

Direct traffic is effectively any traffic that cannot be put into any of the other buckets. My earlier post focused on the subset of direct traffic which has been referred to as ‘dark social’. This will include people who click on links in messaging apps like WhatsApp…these apps don’t leave any digital fingerprints so the data is recorded as ‘direct’.

AI traffic

However, traffic from AI tools is increasingly showing up in the ‘direct’ bucket too, and this is something that has been capturing a lot of attention recently, e.g. see:
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• The AI Traffic Attribution Crisis: Why Your Analytics Are Wrong (Updated With Real Data) - November 2025

• The 70% Problem: Your AI Traffic Is Hiding in GA4 Direct - June 2026

• Your AI Traffic Is Hiding: A Practical Guide to Tracking ChatGPT, Claude, and More - June 2026

Even though analytics platforms like Matomo are trying to now identify AI traffic, it’s not easy and people like me who spend a lot of time looking at website data, are finding it harder to get a clear picture of how websites are being used.

Here is some actual data from three websites that I manage. The chart below shows the percentage of traffic that is recorded as search engine or direct at three different time periods (the first six months of 2024, 2025, and 2026). The websites are anonymised. 

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In all three cases, these websites have seen a big decline in the share of traffic coming from search engines and a corresponding big rise in the share of direct traffic. I’m only focusing on the share of traffic from different sources rather than the total level of traffic.

It’s possible that this rise in direct traffic has nothing to do with AI…but that’s the problem with direct traffic, it’s all unknowable.

If this change is largely driven by AI (which seems reasonable) then it means that the future of managing a website is going to be a very different experience. We might expect to see declining levels of overall traffic. We might also expect to see that the vast majority of traffic is direct traffic.

The quality of your traffic is going to matter much more than quantity but identifying high-quality vs low-quality traffic is another challenge altogether.

2,000 links and one new colour

It was recently World Refugee Day (20 June) and for much of the last six months I have been racing to help launch a new website project for the Careif charity where I volunteer my time.

We chose 20 June as our target launch date for CARE - the Careif Archive of Refugee Empowerment. CARE is a collection of resources relating to the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers aimed at both professionals working in these areas as well as those directly affected and in need of help. You can read more about it in the launch news story which I wrote.

I’ve been helping build these pages at Careif since last year. There is a lot of content (it brings together links to over 2,000 external resources) and it means that the number of pages at Careif has effectively tripled.

Building the site

Squarespace page folders

Although there were some talks about whether this might be a completely separate website to Careif, we decided to build it as part of the site.

That has led to a few challenges in working with the Squarespace CMS. Although Squarespace lets you arrange pages in folders, you can only have one level of hierarchy. The new CARE pages predominantly concern adult resources and child resources, but there are also other sections (e.g. resources for humanitarian workers).

I can create URLs for all of these pages that reflect this hierarchy, e.g.

• careif.org/care/adult-resources

• careif.org/care/child-resources

• careif.org/care/humanitarian-resources

However, Squarespace doesn’t let you recreate that hierarchy visually in the CMS. This is because, although you can create folders to help arrange pages, they can only be one level deep (I think the primary purpose of folders is to arrange pages that will appear in navigation menus). This may seem a minor point but I think it points to the challenges of using Squarespace if you are going to develop a big website.

So I ended up having to create three separate folders to make it easier to manage these pages, with one folder each for adult and child resources and another folder for everything else.

A new colour

When building the ‘new’ Careif website a few years ago, I had settled on a very simple colour palette which was based on the (pre-existing) Careif logo. As the CARE pages have greatly expanded the Careif site, I felt like we needed one new colour to be used on CARE pages which was distinct from the existing colours but which still complemented them.

Using one of the many online colour palette tools that you can find (I used the excellent coolors), I settled on ‘raspberry’ as the CARE accent colour. This is applied as an underline on page titles and also as a new secondary button colour.

Rethinking the content model

There is still work to be done in creating one more page of resources for CARE. In putting these pages together, I feel that ultimately all of the page content should be completely rebuilt as some form of database with all resources tagged/categorised appropriately. 

One possible solution for this in Squarespace would be to create every individual resource as its own blog post (with relevant tags/categories applied) and then use a third-party plugin to have a front-end that lets you search and filter all blog posts.

This would be a lot of work but could make managing the content easier as there would only be one content item (a blog post) for each resource, whereas currently some individual resources are duplicated across different pages.

Tackling link rot

Now that the site has grown so much, an additional challenge is to be better at checking for ‘link rot’. With over 2,000 links to external sites, we can expect those links to break regularly as sites shut down, get merged with other organisations, or just rearrange all of their content. This is a common challenge with managing any site that links to a lot of external material.

At RCPsych we use Dr Link Check to find broken links (there are various paid plans available) and I think we will try using this at Careif too now.

Time for a break

This has been a lot of work to get the CARE pages together and it is pleasing to see that they are already generating traffic. For me personally, this is now the third big piece of web development I’ve done outside of work this year. I’ve built an artist’s website for a friend (meganyelets.com), I’ve rebuilt this website and now I’ve helped launch CARE. I think I have earned a summer break now!

Stop opening Outlook just to check your calendar

Away from work, I am a Mac and iPad user. If I want to check my calendar, I open a calendar app. If I want to check my email, I open an email app.

At work though, I’m locked into the standard PC-based, Microsoft environment. My employer expects me to use all of the standard Windows 11 apps. So that’s Microsoft Edge for web browsing, Microsoft To Do for creating to do lists, Microsoft OneNote for taking notes etc.

So this is the problem: if I only want to see my calendar, I have to open Microsoft Outlook and that comes with the heavy baggage of also being my email client. This means that my intention to just check what my day or week is going to look like runs the risk of me seeing my email inbox.

Why is having one app for emails and calendars a bad thing? 

Even the strongest-willed among us will know the feeling of getting sucked into dealing with emails that are sitting in your inbox just because they are there, They tease and taunt us…pulling us in like sirens luring sailors to their death.

You may intend to only open your calendar app but because Microsoft have made that go hand-in-hand with your emails, you might find yourself diverted into reading that new email from your boss, and then that email from a colleague that you were waiting on…and 30 minutes later you realise that you haven’t yet looked at your calendar.

Distractions like this create something called ‘attention residue’. This is a phrase coined by researcher Sophie Leroy in a 2009 article on Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks.

This article refers to the problems caused by ‘task switching’ where even if you do get back to your calendar app, your mind continues to have traces of focus still lingering on whatever emails you were looking at. Every distraction like this might cost you as much as 23 minutes to gain your focus back.

Microsoft created a solution…and then killed it

For a while, there was a glorious solution to this problem, one that Microsoft itself instigated. Windows 11 includes a ‘Widgets board’ that can display various widgets, including weather, stocks, etc. This can be launched by clicking on the relevant icon in your taskbar, but you can also launch it by simply pressing Windows + W.

I used this extensively, as it let you have a calendar widget and a To Do widget. It was wonderful. A simple keyboard shortcut could quickly let me show (and then hide) what my day was looking like. Microsoft clearly understood the issues of having a combined app for emails and calendar and was doing something about it.

Or at least they only understood it until November 2024, when they removed those widgets from the Widgets board.

Microsoft made something that I actually admired and then pulled it out of my hands. This was maddening, but I would not let it rest.

Building the solution that Microsoft doesn’t want you to have

My own frustration with getting distracted by emails when all I wanted to do was view my calendar led me to create a simple solution. I have a Windows shortcut on my desktop that launches an app view of my Outlook calendar (a single webpage but with no address bar, or bookmarks bar etc), and this is all controlled by a keyboard shortcut.

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

1. Right-click an empty area of your Windows desktop and choose New → Shortcut

2. In the Location field box of the resulting pop-up window, add the following (which should work on any corporate Windows setup) "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --app="https://outlook.office.com/calendar/view/day"

3. Click Next

4. Choose a name for the shortcut, e.g. 'Today's calendar'

5. Click Finish

6. Now, right-click on the shortcut icon on your desktop and choose 'Properties'

7. In the 'Shortcut key' field, add the keyboard shortcut that you want to use (I use Control + Alt +C)

8. Click OK to finish 

What your shortcut properties might look like

This will make Edge open the web version of Outlook in app mode (which removes things like the address bar, bookmarks bar, etc.) and display your calendar in 'day' view.

The final result!

If you prefer to view your calendar in a week or month mode, just use the appropriate URL in step 2:

• outlook.office.com/calendar/view/week

• outlook.office.com/calendar/view/workweek

• outlook.office.com/calendar/view/month

Of course you are free to choose any keyboard shortcut for step 7, but first check it is not already being used by Windows.

Hope this is of use to anyone like myself who feels somewhat trapped in a Windows world at work. As a Mac/iPad user who has sometimes tried getting through a work day using nothing but an iPad Pro, I may return to similar issues in future blog posts!

20th century boy

Note, this is a blog post I originally wrote in September 2011 when I lived in Davis, California. It was written shortly after I heard the news that my grandad had died. It was originally posted on the website of the local newspaper (the Davis Enterprise).

December 27, 1918.

Sometimes, when we see dates like this, it is not always possible to truly comprehend the passage of time that has elapsed since that point in history. Let us consider what things would be like if you were born on this date, and you found yourself entering the world at this early part of the twentieth century. How would your life be different if you were a child born only weeks after the first world war had ended?

To begin with, you would be around to experience all of the world-changing events that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.  Most significantly, you would live through both the Great Depression and World War II. You would witness the technological miracles of the age: movies with sound, television, commercial radio, refrigerators, frozen food, and transatlantic flight, to name but a few.

Can you even conceive what your life would be like without these things that we take for granted today? If you were born on this date in the United Kingdom, then you might also have lived under four different monarchs and eighteen different Prime Ministers.

December 27, 1918 was the day that a boy called Dennis was born. Like many of his generation, he was very much a local man and the vast majority of his life was spent in the same house in the same town — a town whose population would experience a more than five-fold increase in his lifetime.

His family had long been established in the local area — at least as far back as the mid-18th century. Although his surname would remain relatively common in his home town, one of his more distant relations would achieve great sporting fame on the other side of the planet.

Sometimes I wonder what someone like Dennis, a man who had never travelled overseas, would make of a city like Davis, California. Despite the large differences in culture between an old English market town and a small, modern California city, I think Dennis would like it here.

He came from a farming family and spent many years working for a local fruit processing company. He was also a keen gardener and had his own allotment for many years. He also kept chickens. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that Dennis would have liked Davis very much indeed. Although he was better known to his friends as “Johnny,” to me he was more simply known as “Grandad.”

RIP Dennis “Johnny” Bradnam
December 27 1918 – September 6 2011