Part 1 · Create a Habit

A habit is anything you mean to keep coming back to: a daily routine, a side project, something you’re learning.

The first time you open the app, it adds a habit called Learn Excellence for this course. If it’s in your list, use the form below on a habit of your own instead. A second “Learn Excellence” is folded back into the first within a minute. If you deleted it, Help › Create Tutorial Habit brings it back.

Try it

Open the app and press ⌘N, or click the + button above the list.

The New Habit form opens.

Try it

1. In the big field at the top, type a name. If you don’t have Learn Excellence yet, use that name.
2. In the Add a link row underneath, paste the address of this page: https://excellenceisahabit.app/learn.
3. At the bottom, click Add Description and type something like “Working out how to use the Excellence app.”
4. Click Add Habit.

That first field takes either a name or a link: paste a web address and the app fetches the page’s title and names the habit after it. If another habit already uses that link, the form says which one. The description box stays out of the way until you ask for it, because most habits don’t need one.

Between the link and the description sit When and Contexts, covered in the next two parts. Everything in this form can also be changed later.

Note

The free version keeps up to 20 habits that aren’t archived. Past that, adding a habit opens Excellence Pro, a one-time purchase that removes the limit. Settings shows how many of the 20 you’ve used.

What the link did

Look at the sidebar: under Link Groups, the Active Groups fold now has a row for the address, excellenceisahabit.app/learn. Habits are grouped by their web address and nest by its path, so several habits on the same site sit together. Part 5 goes further into this.

Editing a habit

Clicking a habit selects it, like any Mac list: select several at once, drag to reorder, press Delete to remove.

Try it

To edit a habit, right-click it and choose Edit…, or double-click it.

The edit form has the same fields as the one you just filled in, and a few more. A line under the name says whether you logged effort today (“Done today”), when you last did, and how many efforts there are in all. Further down are the habit’s Goal (Part 7) and Notes (Part 4).

On iPhone and iPad, tap a habit to edit it, and the form saves when you tap Save. Cancel asks before throwing away changes.