Monthly review with Insights

Why monthly

Weekly is too soon to see a pattern; a single bad week looks like a trend. Yearly is too late to do anything about it. A month is enough days for the heatmap to mean something and short enough that the next month can be different.

Pick a day. The first weekend of the month works, as a longer version of the Sunday reset. Fifteen minutes is plenty.

What Insights shows

The Insights page has a few parts:

• A heatmap, one square per day, shaded by the share of due habits you completed. Tap a day to see its list.
• A weekly completion chart, a bar per week.
• Per-habit stats: completion rate, current and longest streak, best weekday, and when in the day you tend to check in.
• Summary tiles: total check-ins, Clean Sweeps (perfect days), longest streak ever, active days this month.

On Free, Insights covers the last 30 days: this month's heatmap and the last few weeks of the chart. Pro shows your full history, the year heatmap, and a monthly report delivered in the app and by email on the 1st. Older history on Free is kept, not deleted; it is just behind Pro.

The fifteen minutes

Work through it in order:

1. Look at the heatmap for the shape. Are the pale days clustered? Weekends, the week of a trip, the last few days of the month? Patterns beat individual days.
2. Read the weekly chart. The last four bars are this month. If they trend down, something got heavier. If one is low, that was probably a week with a reason.
3. Open each habit's stats. The completion rate is the honest number. Best weekday tells you where the habit fits; time-of-day tells you when you actually do it, which is often not the section you put it in.
4. Check the tiles. Clean Sweeps and active days are the two that tell you how the month felt overall.
5. Decide one change. One.

What to change

The review is only useful if something small changes afterward. The usual candidates:

• A habit with a low completion rate gets shrunk (smaller target) or moved (different time of day). Both edits apply going forward; the past stays as it was.
• A habit that is mostly skips gets archived or paused. When to archive a habit has the signs.
• A habit with a best weekday that is not its scheduled day gets rescheduled.
• A habit you did every day without thinking gets archived as finished and its slot given to something new.

Resist changing five things. One change, held for a month, is something you can evaluate. Five changes is a new app.

Trust the numbers

The stats are only as good as the entries. A month of honest partials and skips produces a heatmap you can learn from; a month of rounded-up check-ins produces a pretty one that teaches you nothing. Backfilling honestly is the companion read, and the review is the moment the honesty pays off.

Notes and mood

If you keep a one-line note on your check-ins, the review is when to scroll the timeline on a habit like Journal or Read. The notes say why the pale days were pale, which the heatmap cannot. On Pro, a simple overlay shows mood chips alongside completion, as a plain log, with no interpretation attached.

A worked example

Say Deep work block, 90 minutes on weekdays, shows a 55% completion rate, a best weekday of Tuesday, and most check-ins logged after 2pm, even though it sits in Morning. The change is obvious once you see it: move the habit to Afternoon, or shrink it to 60 minutes, and look again next month. One edit, one month, one more look.

Try it in SweepTech

Open Insights, tap the palest week on the heatmap, and find out what happened. Then make one change. If you want a routine to hang the review on, the Sunday Reset has a "Review week" step that becomes the monthly version on the first Sunday.