How We Build Small Daily Goals and Reminders That People Keep
A look behind the scenes at how Rohan Hegde and the team design daily goals and reminders in the app, from the first sketch to the phone in your pocket.
6 minutes to read
Starting from a goal that feels almost too small
When we began work on Build a Daily Habit, the first argument in the team was about size. Ananya, who writes our training plans, kept pushing for goals that a tired person could finish on the worst day of the week. I come from the engineering side, and my instinct was to give people a clear target and a progress bar. We ended up with both ideas, and the compromise shaped everything else.
So the default daily goal in the app is deliberately modest: ten minutes of movement, a short walk, a few stretches, or a light jog. It is easy to raise later, but nobody has to start by promising an hour. We tested early versions with colleagues and friends who had quit gyms before, and the same sentence kept coming up: I stopped because I missed three days and felt I had failed.
That sentence sits on the wall next to our desks in Mysuru. Every design choice in this feature is checked against it. If a screen makes a missed day feel like a verdict, we change it.
How a reminder is actually built
A reminder looks simple from the outside: a notification at a set time. Behind it, there is more thinking than you would expect. On Android, phones from different makers handle background tasks very differently, and some of them quietly stop apps from waking up to deliver an alert. A reminder that never arrives is worse than no reminder, because you blame yourself instead of the phone.
My part of the work is making these alerts dependable on everyday handsets, not only on the newest ones. We schedule each reminder with the system's own alarm tools, check that it survives a restart, and test on older, cheaper phones that many of our readers actually carry. When a phone is set to save battery aggressively, the app explains how to allow reminders instead of failing silently.
We also keep the wording human. A message reads like a friendly nudge, not an order, and it never repeats the same sentence five days in a row.
- Reminders are scheduled with the phone's own alarm system
- Alerts are tested after restarts and on older Android phones
- Battery saver settings are explained in plain steps
Choosing the time of day with you, not for you
One early version picked a reminder time automatically, based on when you usually opened the app. It felt clever and it was wrong far too often. A person who checks the app at lunch does not necessarily want to run at lunch. We dropped it and moved to a simpler approach: you choose the time, and you can set more than one.
Most people we spoke to in Bengaluru, Pune and Mysuru described two realistic windows: before work, when the roads are cooler and quieter, and after work, when the day is done and the mind wants release. We made it easy to set a main time and a backup time later in the evening, so a missed morning does not end the day.
The backup reminder only fires if you have not logged anything. If you already did your walk, the app stays quiet. That small rule took a surprising amount of testing to get right, but it keeps the app from feeling pushy.
What happens when you miss a day
Missed days are not an edge case. They are the normal course of any habit, and we treat them that way in the design. Early on we showed a streak counter that reset to zero after one missed day. Testers told us, quite bluntly, that it made them want to delete the app, so we reworked the idea.
Today the app looks at your week rather than a single day. If you hit your goal on four days out of seven, that counts as a good week, and the screen says so in plain words. A missed day produces a short, kind message and a smaller goal for the next morning, never a lecture or a red warning.
Ananya reviews this wording herself, because the tone matters as much as the logic. She asks one question of every message: would a good coach say this to a friend who had a hard week? If the answer is no, we rewrite it before it reaches your phone.
- Weekly view instead of an all-or-nothing streak
- A smaller goal is offered after a missed day
- Messages are reviewed for tone before release
Testing with real routines, not perfect ones
Before anything ships, the team lives with it. For several weeks, we each use the daily goals ourselves, and we log what goes wrong, not only what works. I cycle to the office along the palace roads, so my reminder is tied to that ride. Meera, who leads support, tested an evening version around her family dinner.
The most useful findings came from awkward situations: travelling for a wedding, an exam week, a bout of fever, a week of heavy rain. In each case we asked whether the app helped us return gently or made us feel behind. Several settings exist only because one of us got stuck in exactly that way, such as a pause option for days when you simply cannot train.
Support messages feed back into the work as well. When readers write to say a reminder came too early or a goal felt heavy, Meera passes it to us, and those notes often decide what we adjust next.
What the feature does not do
It helps to be plain about limits. The daily goals and reminders do not diagnose anything, and they do not replace advice from a doctor if you have a health condition or an injury. They are a nudge and a record, nothing more, and they work best when the goal is small and honest.
The feature also depends on your phone. If notifications are switched off in the system settings, or if the phone is out of battery, the app cannot reach you, and no amount of clever engineering changes that. We try to explain these cases in the help section so you can fix them yourself in a minute or two.
Finally, a habit is yours, not the app's. We can offer a gentle prompt at a time you chose, but the routine only lasts if it fits your life. That is why every setting can be changed, paused or turned off without a fuss.
- Not a medical tool and not a replacement for professional advice
- Needs notifications enabled and a charged phone
- Every goal and reminder can be changed or paused
Behind a daily goal there is a lot of quiet work: reminders that survive older phones, wording that stays kind, and rules that forgive a missed day. None of it is meant to be noticed. If the feature does its job, you simply find yourself walking, stretching or jogging at the time you chose, and the routine slowly becomes part of an ordinary week.
Rohan Hegde
Lead Mobile EngineerRohan builds the Android experience and keeps run tracking steady on everyday phones. He cycles to work along the Mysuru palace roads.
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