My take is that the right workflow for people is quite varied. Everyone wants something that’s low friction and will keep them engaged but these daily behaviors are fundamentally high friction habits, so existing solutions are rarely satisfying in the long run.

They are also easy to build - you need one primitive: basic text storage, although scheduled push notifications are great to have. No need to sync stuff, no sharing/permission model, no scale issues you can’t solve with a b-tree SQLite index.

I think another factor is an increase in productivity-lifestyle content influencers, the sort of people who talk about Notion on TikTok. Speaking of Notion there’s like a zillion user-created habit tracker templates for Notion too. I work at Notion but don’t use it daily outside of work.

> Productivity-lifestyle content influencers

100% this. They fall into the same camp as "self-help books", "life coaches", and to certain extent "spiritual gurus".

> My take is that the right workflow for people is quite varied.

I agree. I've been tempted lately to write my own local todo + notes + calendar app that fits the way I think about tasks and time. Kind of like developing a software glove for ones mental model. It's no wonder there are so many "gloves" in this space, everyone's model is unique.

I would like notion to support this kind of glove making perfectly but right now it’s too slow and high friction to make sense for the domain for most people. Currently it only works for people with huge friction tolerance, and it’s missing quality calendar tooling & trustworthy configurable push.

It's the same with mobile games.

There are only a limited number of game mechanics, people install for the theme and come back because of it.

You can take a 1:1 copy of a game, reskin it 12 different ways and 1 of those might be a hit.

For apps like this there aren't that many ways to track what you're doing, but people like different kinds of UX.

For me personally I did try a lot of these habit trackers and notetaking systems and none of them quite worked for me so I just decided to build something that's very specific to how I like things. I didn't just build a habit tracker or whatever just for the sake of building another one, I built one that specifically suits my needs.

Usually what happens is a lot of other people in the world also feel the same way as me and if they like how I have approached the app then they would download it and use it and I think that's how you get a lot of different types of habit trackers coming up all the time

They are easy to make and people are very opinionated about what works best for them. Although I'm close to 40 and I feel like they mostly don't help at all. If you're motivated you don't need them, and if you're not motivated they won't motivate you.

Everyone thinks it’s what they need until they realize they don’t.

They are a great little project to procrastinate from doing something useful.