A slip is logged, not punished

Most habit trackers are built for habits you want more of: run, read, meditate. PaceStreak also tracks habits people are trying to break, like smoking, drinking or late-night scrolling. Those need different defaults.

Zero is the good number

For a habit you are building, the number goes up: minutes, pages, steps. For a habit you are breaking, you log slips, and a day with zero slips is a clean day. The logging sheet says so in one line under the counter:

Zero is a clean day. A slip is logged, not punished.

Why “not punished”

Someone cutting down on cigarettes who has one after a hard day faces a choice: log it honestly or leave it out. If logging it wipes out a long run of progress, the app has taught them to lie to it, and a tracker you lie to is useless.

So a slip is data, not a verdict. The weekly target decides whether the week counts, and the note field under the counter asks a practical question instead of a moral one:

What was going on? Spotting triggers helps.

Nobody else ever sees it

A habit’s name, amounts and slips never reach a feed, a profile, a group or a leaderboard. Badges are named generically. Leaderboards may rank the whole-life streak (did you show up this week?), never which habit or how much. Someone breaking a drinking habit must never be outed by the product they are using to do it.

The logging sheet’s note field says the same thing in five words, right where it matters: “Private, like the habit itself.”