You stopped. Maybe for a day, maybe for three weeks. You want to pick it up again, and the only route the app offers is a button that sets the counter to zero and pretends the last two months did not happen. Here is how to start again without throwing them away.
1. Keep the record, mark the gap
Whatever you use to track this, do not delete the history. Mark the days you missed as missed and leave them there.
A record with holes in it is still a record. It tells you that you did this eighteen times, that you stopped in the second week of July, and roughly what was going on when you did. A record you wiped tells you nothing, and the next time you stall you will have nothing to compare it against.
2. Restart at a size you cannot fail
The commonest way a restart dies is on day two, because day one was heroic. You come back after a fortnight off and do the full version to prove you are serious, then you are sore or drained and the next day you do nothing.
Make the first day back embarrassingly small. Five minutes. One page. Put the shoes on and stand outside. The job of the first day is not progress, it is proving the thing is still available to you.
3. Change the trigger, not the goal
People restarting almost always change the target, usually downward, and leave the circumstances identical. Then it fails in the same place for the same reason.
Look at where it actually broke. Not the day you noticed you had stopped, the day before that. Most gaps start at a specific, boring obstacle: the gym bag was in the car, the evening ran late twice in a row, you moved the app off your home screen. Fix the obstacle and the goal usually survives at its original size.
4. Do not reset the number
If your tracker insists on a streak, the streak is going to say zero, and you are going to feel that. Ignore it and count something else instead: total days done, days done this month, longest gap. Those are all going in the right direction even today, and the streak is not.
This is worth doing deliberately, because the number you look at is the number that shapes how you feel about the whole thing. A counter that can only be destroyed will eventually destroy your interest in the goal along with itself.
5. Give it a visible finish
Open-ended goals are hard to restart because there is no state to return to. Pick a length, even an arbitrary one. Thirty days from today. Whatever it takes to get to the end of the month.
A goal with an end has a shape, and a shape is something you can be part way through. Part way through is a much easier thing to come back to than forever.
What this looks like in Reveal the Dream
The app is built around exactly this problem, which is why there is no streak in it at all.
You pick a photograph of the thing you are working toward and it starts covered. Every check-in uncovers one more piece. Miss a day, mark it missed, and that day's piece stays covered while the days either side keep opening. Nothing resets, nothing is deleted, and the picture keeps arriving. Come back after two weeks away and everything you earned before is still uncovered, waiting where you left it.
Day Review lets you go back and change any day you have already marked, so a day you recorded wrong in the middle of a bad week is a thing you can correct rather than a reason to wipe the journey.
Related: I broke my streak, should I start over? and a habit tracker without streaks.