Guide · 7 min read
Reading Your Insights: Adherence, Projections, Best/Worst Days
Turn ProtoHabit's charts into decisions: what adherence really measures, how to read weekly patterns and projections, and what to change based on each.
Start with adherence, not streaks
Adherence is the percentage of scheduled habit occurrences you actually completed over a window. Unlike a streak, it cannot be destroyed by one bad day — it is the fairest single number for "how is this going?"
insights-01-adherence.webp Read the weekly chart for shape, not score
The weekly bars show your completions across the last weeks. Ignore the exact numbers; look at the shape. Flat and modest beats spiky and heroic — spikes are what burnout looks like on a chart.
insights-02-weekly.webp Find your best and worst days
The best/worst analysis names the weekdays where you consistently shine and consistently slip. This is scheduling gold: your worst day is not a character flaw, it is a calendar problem with a calendar solution.
insights-03-best-worst.webp Check per-habit breakdowns before changing anything
Overall adherence hides which habit is dragging. The per-habit view separates "the system is failing" (everything low) from "one habit is mis-designed" (one outlier) — two very different fixes.
insights-04-per-habit.webp Use the projection graph to look forward
For deadline Goals, the S-curve projection extrapolates your real pace to the finish line. It is the difference between hoping you are on track and knowing — weeks before it matters.
insights-05-projection.webp
Data does not change behavior; decisions do. ProtoHabit’s insights exist to convert your logs into exactly three kinds of decisions: what to shrink, what to reschedule, and what to double down on. Here is how to read each view with a decision in mind.
Adherence: the honest number
A 100-day streak with a hidden pile of skipped afternoon habits feels better than 78% adherence, but the percentage is telling you the truth. Healthy ranges to hold in your head:
- Above 85% — the habit is nearly automatic. Candidate for a difficulty bump or a new habit alongside it.
- 60–85% — the working zone. Normal for anything less than three months old. Improve the cue or the reminder before changing the habit itself.
- Below 60% — the habit as designed does not fit your life as lived. Shrink it (five minutes, not thirty), move it, or replace it. Do not white-knuckle it.
Worst days are scheduling problems
The single most actionable insight in the app is the worst-day finding. If Thursdays are reliably your weakest day, the fix is almost never “try harder on Thursdays” — it is moving your heaviest habits off Thursday, or building a deliberately tiny Thursday version. One calendar change routinely buys more adherence than a month of motivation.
Projections reward the patient
Early on, the projection graph will swing with every good or bad week — extrapolation from small samples is noisy. Give it two to three weeks of data before treating it as a verdict. After that, trust it more than your mood: feelings about progress lag reality in both directions.
Deep insights — full adherence breakdowns, projections, and best/worst analysis — are part of ProtoHabit+.
Put it into practice
Open ProtoHabit and try it — this guide will still be here.
