Habits are powerful shapers of our actions and can be notoriously hard to break. Often, we’re not even aware of them, let alone how they hold us back from achieving our goals.
As a practitioner, you’ve probably used a few tracking tools to raise your clients’ awareness, overcome unhelpful habits, and shape their own behavior. This article shows you how to track them more effectively in an online context, using Quenza as a habit tracker app for coaching, therapy, or counseling.
What is the Best Habit Tracker App?
Client tracking is a well-established approach to shaping behavior change in all kinds of helping professions, and there are a great many tools available for the job:
- Pen and paper
- Spreadsheets and calendars
- Journals and diaries
- Digital wearables, and of course
- Habit tracker apps.
While the technology has evolved, however, the fundamental value of an effective tracker remains the same. To help clients drive and sustain positive changes, habit trackers need to provide professionals and their clients with relevant, accurate insights into their behavior.
Specifically, a well-designed habit tracker app achieves this by:
- Giving clients a convenient way to log their habits, triggers, and contexts throughout the day
- Prompting or reminding them to be regular with their tracking, and
- Collecting habit data to form a consolidated (‘big picture’) overview of their behavior, so that clients and their professionals can decide on how best to break unwanted habits.
How To Track Habits with Quenza: An Example
As a professional e-health, e-therapy, and coaching app, Quenza has a range of easy-to-use digital tools that makes it perfect for tracking habits and behaviors.
Regardless of what you’re keeping track of, you can use Quenza to design and share personalized tools that fit effortlessly into your clients’ lifestyle, then collect their records securely to inform their treatment, development, or learning.
To help clients drive and sustain positive changes, habit trackers need to provide professionals and their clients with relevant, accurate insights into their behavior.
Not only that, but with Quenza, you can gather real-time data from your clients’ habit journals, worksheets, and diaries, and offer live feedback along the way that will help them in the moment.
There are a few ways to use Quenza as a habit tracker app, but the fastest and most effective way is by designing your own bespoke tracker in a few simple steps.
How To Design & Share Habit Tracking Tools
Diaries and journals not only help clients stay on top of their habits each day, but they also provide an overview of any trends that exist over weeks, months, or even years.
They can range from simple tools (e.g. linear scales that a client completes at intervals) to more comprehensive assessments with reflection questions, prompts, and exercises.
For example, you might want to help a client track some unhelpful habits that are related to anxiety:
- Nail-biting
- Smoking, or
- Skipping meals.
Simultaneously, you may be supporting them as they strive to replace them with more adaptive habits:
- Deep breathing
- Exercising, or
- Eating healthy, regular meals.
With Quenza’s Activity Builder, you can create a Habit Diary using linear scales as we’ve done:
To make it slightly more in-depth, you might include text boxes that prompt clients to explore potential triggers or analyze their habits a little further.
By saving a customized Activity for a single diary page, you can then easily create daily journals by assembling them into a Pathway.
Simply select your Habit Diary as each step in your Pathway and set custom intervals between each step to share your log with your clients at pre-defined intervals.
You can send a habit log every day, as we’ve done above, or however frequently you’ve decided on in your treatment or coaching plan. As soon as they complete their diary, you’ll be able to see the results in your Dashboard for insights into their progress.
For more resources to help you plan your sessions, we recommend Your Life Coaching Session Planner Example + Template.
Group Habit Tracking: Tools in Quenza
Tracking habits manually can be a headache when you’re working with a large number of participants, such as in group therapy or coaching.
With Quenza Groups, however, it’s possible to share a single habit tracking tool with entire teams, classes, or groups of up to 50 participants at once.
You can also:
- Bulk import participants from a spreadsheet to create the coaching or therapy groups you want to help track
- Stay in contact with your group members using Quenza’s HIPAA-compliant Group Chat
- Monitor your group’s progress in real-time from your Dashboard
- Check which participants have (or have not!) completed their habit trackers, and
- Bulk export habit data for all your group members to get a big picture overview of their performance.
Quenza Groups makes it incredibly simple for you to use the client app as a convenient habit tracking tool without any paper forms or email back and forths. It’s the perfect way to automate tracking tools as part of packages, workshops, classes, or group programs with minimal running around!
Using Quenza For Journaling
What if you want to expand your habit trackers from simple daily assessments to more detailed diaries or journals?
If you’d like to help clients understand their habits on a more in-depth level, there are countless ways to design each participant log to align with a client’s unique goals.
You might create fields that explore the following, to name a few:
- When they most frequently engage in unwanted habits
- Where they are when their habits are most troublesome
- Key events or triggers that might be related to these behaviors
- How they feel before and after habitual behaviors, or
- Things that they find helpful in maintaining a positive habit.
Quenza’s Stress Diary, above, provides a few examples of potential reflection questions that can help you turn a simple daily log into a habit journal.
For more, take a look at our guide to the Best Online Journaling Software For Therapy & Coaching Clients.
5 Extra Features Included In Quenza
With Quenza, you can not only design and build your own personalized client tracking tools, but you also brand your solutions, give live feedback, and remind clients to complete their trackers.
Besides the Activity Builder, Expansions, and Quenza Pathways, some of the features that help you create bespoke, professional, and easy-to-use solutions include:
- Quenza Chat: For private, secure instant messaging with personal clients or client groups. You can give advice, answer questions, or offer encouragement anytime or anywhere from your mobile or laptop.
- Quenza White Label: So you can feature your custom logo and brand on all your tools, PDFs, and in your client’s mobile portal. With Quenza White Label, you can also send emails from your professional address.
- The Client App: A convenient coaching or patient portal that your clients can use to log into Quenza from their connected devices, and where they’ll receive chat notifications and reminders for your Activities. You can even customize your own app with your brand colors and choice of language.
- Client Notes: An organized way to create and store HIPAA-compliant therapy or coaching notes from your sessions alongside your clients’ activities, overviews, and profiles, and
- Quenza Community: A space to ask questions, share advice, or swap ideas with your peers and receive support from Quenza developers.
As a coach, therapist, trainer, or counselor, Quenza gives you a beautifully efficient, effective way to deliver blended care solutions your way – easily, and from anywhere.
Final Thoughts
Positive behavioral change is all about having healthy habits that support our goals, but it can be as hard to build a new habit as it is to break one.
A habit tracker app like Quenza can help you build your clients’ awareness of the subconscious behaviors that support or hold them back. Knowing what makes them tick, you can easily create brilliantly engaging tracker tools that fit seamlessly into their lifestyles and give them a better chance of success.
If you’d like to try out Quenza as your habit tracker app, don’t forget to start your 30-day, $1 trial. Quenza’s HIPAA-compliant digital tools will help you design and share habit tracking journals, diaries, and exercises easily, and monitor your clients’ progress for the changes they want to see.
