đŞď¸ The Upward Spiral
A new way to visualise your progress, while tracking habits
Hi Notioneer, happy new year!
New year, new habits or hopefully, youâre just continuing old ones đ
Either way, Iâm guessing youâll be using a habit tracker to help keep you motivated or maybe considering trying a new oneâŚUsing a typical habit tracker is great when you want to see whether youâre completing your habits regularly. But when you keep making progress, thereâs a much more exciting trend thatâs happening in the background, which youâre habit tracker probably isnât showing you - so Iâve made an alternative that willâŚ
If you just want to download the template straight away, you can get it here.
Your Progress Towards Your Goals Is Not Linear
This is a simple concept, although if youâre as bad at maths as I am, it might take you some time to wrap your head around â if you get 1% fitter each week then, thanks to compounding, by the end of the year you wonât be 52% fitter, youâll be 68% fitter.

The power of compounding means that if you keep that trend going, youâre making bigger and bigger leaps in progress every time you get 1% better, even though that 1% improvement is very achievable from your current position.
On the flipside, if you stop exercising and your fitness declines by 1% each week, youâll only be 59% as fit by the end of the year - and your energy levels will have probably fallen by a similar amount!
The Upward Spiral
Most habit trackers donât enable you to visualise either of these concepts of course. They show you whether youâre completing habits consistently or not but they donât show that progress accumulating.
So when you complete habits in the Upward Spiral, youâre not adding a +1 to the number of habits that youâve completed that day, youâre adding 1% to your progress from the day before.
When you take a break, itâs easy to ignore those empty checkboxes too, it takes a while before you start to feel the affects of not working out / eating unhealthily and even when you do, you get used to them.
Your progress score defaults to a negative score which reflects that reality - if you do nothing then youâre not just standing still, in reality your progress will decline.
You override that negative score with a positive score when you complete a habit.
I find it very motivating to see the progress that Iâve accumulated dwindling away, which compels me to start completing my habits again, to stop that decline.
Getting Set Up
đŹ Setup guide
This template is made up of three components:
A simple Notion template, where youâll track your habitâs completion
An Apple Shortcut, which you can use to log your habits. Or if you donât have an Apple device, youâll still be able to update your scores manually
A Rows spreadsheet template, which plots your progress on a chart
While working on this template, Iâve also been making progress towards making my automations and templates easier for you to start using. Iâve got Notionâs OAuth process set up, which means that to get set up, all you need to do is:
Click the Start button here
Click the Next button to approve the integration
Click Allow Access to copy the Notion template and connect it with the API đĽ
The next page that youâll see will be displaying your API Key, this takes the place of the Internal Integration Token that you had to create yourself to use my automations before.
Once youâve copied that and stored it safely, you can paste it into the settings for the Apple Shortcut and Rows template, along with the database ID for your new Habits database, to connect them with your Notion databases via Notionâs API.
Then just connect your Rows spreadsheet with Notion too, embed your copy of the Rows chart in the Notion template and youâre ready to go đ
A note about privacy
Connecting with a Notion integration like this can give the developer access to the pages that you share with the integration (but only those pages, not your entire workspace).
I donât need access to your habit tracker though so Iâm not storing your API Key when itâs created by the automation, which means that I wonât have access to any of the information that youâre storing while using this template.
Using your existing habit tracker &/or checkboxes
If youâd prefer to keep using an existing habit tracker system, you can connect the chart and Apple Shortcuts with it.
Click here and choose the âSelect pages to share with The Upward Spiralâ option here:
Then share the page containing your habit tracker with the integration.
Youâll also need to update your habits database to calculate a daily score, based on your checkbox / date properties. Iâve explained how to do that at the bottom of the Notion template.
If youâve made it this far then you deserve a reward - grab that template now!
Itâs live on Product Hunt too, Iâd appreciate your support đ
Iâve also been working the most challenging and exciting Notion project that Iâve ever taken on đ If I manage to get it working, Iâll share it with you here soon.
Alex