GitHub-style habit graph generator

Type the habit’s name at the top of this page, then tap each day you did it, or paste a list of dates to import them. The graph draws one square per day in week columns, exactly like a GitHub contribution graph, and shades a day darker the more you did. When it looks right, download it as a PNG or an SVG. It runs in your browser, needs no account, and saves to this device only.

In the best-known study, 96 volunteers each repeated one daily behaviour, and among those whose data fitted the model it took a median of 66 days for the behaviour to become about as automatic as it would get. The range was 18 to 254 days. A 2024 review of 20 studies found medians of 59 to 66 days and means of 106 to 154, and a 2023 study of 30,110 gym members put gym habits at roughly four to seven months. The honest answer is about two months for something simple, longer for something hard, and wide variation either way.

Not in the research. In Lally and colleagues’ 2010 study, missing a single opportunity “did not materially affect the habit formation process”: automaticity dipped very slightly and kept rising. What a missed day does break is a streak counter, and a 2023 set of seven studies found that seeing a broken streak lowers people’s next engagement even when their actual behaviour was the same. That is why this page leads with consistency and counts comebacks.

There is no validated threshold. For calibration, the people whose habits formed most clearly in the 2010 study did the behaviour on a median of 88% of days, with the middle half between 80% and 94%. For exercise, a 2015 study of 111 new gym members found that at least four sessions a week for six weeks was the minimum to establish the habit. Those are descriptions of what happened in studies, not targets you have to hit.

Both, depending on whether the streak is intact. An intact streak raised people’s next engagement in Silverman and Barasch’s studies, and a broken one lowered it, regardless of what they had actually done. Rewarding the return instead helps: in a 61,293-person megastudy, the best of 54 gym programmes paid a bonus for coming back after a missed workout and added about 27% more visits. A streak is worth seeing; it is a poor thing to make the whole graph about.

Yes, as a CSV. Paste or upload any file with one date per line (2026-03-14 or 2026/03/14), optionally followed by a number, and each date becomes a done day. Rows with a zero, “no”, or “false” after the date are skipped. A Habit Pocket export is read as it is: choose the habit from the list. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.