Daily Deeds Helps Manage Your Habits

Here at ProfHacker, we love to-do apps.  Whether you roll with Things, Remember the Milk, Google Tasks (forthcoming!, Teux Deux, or something else, you’ll find an enthusiast writing for the site.   There are some tasks, though, that you want to do daily and that might not sit well with a full-blown task manager.  Say you’re trying to pick up a new habit–or quit an old one.  Then, you want to keep track of your progress, but you don’t necessarily want to be thinking about it while you’re working.

Daily Deeds is an iPhone/iPod Touch app designed to help you with just this kind of low-level problem. It’s simple and clever, and what it lacks in power features it makes up for in easiness and fun.  Here’s a screenshot of one of my daily tasks:

As you can see, I’ve done a pretty good job of annoying her–4 out of the past 6 days!  And when I get around to annoying her today, I just tap that big circle in the middle, and the day is checked off.

If I want to add a new daily habit, then I tap “Add” in the upper-right-hand corner.  You delete habits with the iPhone OS-standard swipe.  You can, by tapping the bottom-right icon, reset (“zero”) your deeds, or e-mail yourself a .pdf report.

You can also take a longer view of your habits:

Again, looks like I’m doing pretty well!

When I think of “things I need to,” there’s a difference between “buy groceries” or “make friendship salad for the 1st graders,” on the one hand, and “eat fruit at least three times a day.”  For the former, I like to use Things.  For the latter, if you are the sort who thinks it’s fun to track things, then Daily Deeds may well be for you. It would be awesome if you could export your data into Daytum, but this is a credible standalone solution.

Also, it gives me an excuse to link to this.

Funny graph of “the caffeine curve” by Tom Edmonds, posted by Flickr user emdot / Creative Commons licensed