We are obsessed with "daily streaks". But how do you track the irregular maintenance of life?
As builders, we love tracking daily metrics: MRR, GitHub commits, daily workouts, Inbox Zero. Standard habit trackers are incredibly optimized for this gamification.
But lately, I've realized my "mental RAM" gets completely eaten up by the irregular tasks. The stuff you only need to do every few weeks or months:
Changing the AC filter
Watering specific houseplants
Following up with that one dormant enterprise lead
Taking as-needed medication
Taking a full day away from the screen
If you put these into a standard habit tracker, you inevitably break a "streak" and get a giant red calendar of guilt for a task you were only supposed to do every 21 days anyway.
I got so frustrated by this gap in productivity software that I ended up building my own "anti-habit" iOS tracker just to calculate the intervals for me.
But Iām super curious how the rest of you handle this mental load.
What is your current system for irregular chores?
A chaotic Notion database?
A massive Apple Reminders list?
Scheduled Google Calendar events?
Pure brain power and hoping for the best?
Would love to hear your setups!
Replies
Apparent for Gmail
GoodTask! Definitely not a perfect solution though. Great mainly because one time cost, fully on-device (wrapper over Apple Reminders), private, and syncs to everything.
I've found a minor improvement for measuring "streaks" for those types of tasks, is simply keeping a total of the times it was completed. š Monkey brain like up and to the right.
PickleMatch
google calendar events for infrequent but recurring, emails to myself for 1x in the future, a notion to-do list that carries over everything from previous day
@annelieseĀ For todo stuff Notion is amazing.
But for the infrequent events, scheduling on Google Calendar could be draining, I feel. To make the process easy I built an app called SinceWhen that helps to log infrequent events and track them without hassle.
The irregular stuff is what actually drains mental RAM the most. I handle it with a simple "maintenance calendar" - recurring items at realistic intervals, not daily streaks. For the ones with context (like that dormant enterprise lead), a short AI-generated brief before the follow-up saves a lot of re-warming time.
@jeroenerneĀ Btw, is that "maintenance calendar" a dedicated application or a simple calendar?
I've actually created myself a dedicated app called SinceWhen where I log every time I finish the event and after a certain number of logs, it starts nudging me about the event and shows how frequently I do it.
This hit hard š I use simple calendar reminders for these instead of streak apps ā feels way less stressful and actually gets things done.
@allinonetools_netĀ If the calendar works, then it's nice.
But the activities I mentioned is about daily chores, something like charging earbuds, or filling gas, etc how often it lasts is something difficult to track using a calendar you know.
I actually thought about this before and ended up just using a simple notes app with dates next to each task :)
The thing is, most of these irregular maintenance things don't need perfect timing anyway, so I just check my list when I remember and see what's been sitting there longest.
BTW, for something like charging earbuds, do you really need to track that since you'll notice when they die?
@rohanrecommendsĀ Yeah, I use to do the same in Notion. I use to add the time stamp using "@" beside the event.
But tracking and analysing the frequency became tough. And I wanted a much easier way with a click of a button to log the timestamp instantly.
Regarding charging earbuds or smartwatch or even keyboard/mouse, I wanted to understand how long the battery lasts and over time, how the interval to charge is changing inc/dec. I want to charge when the battery is around 20% not wait until it dies because Lithium-ion batteries are good when charged before draining them completely for longer battery life.
Using the SinceWhen app, I can now understand the frequency, predict the expected date for the next log, and receive nudges to act. And most importantly, log the timestamp instantly without forgetting.