Note: Although I might provide some specific examples, what I say here applies to any habit you want to establish or maintain. That might be a work habit, like writing regularly. Or it might be self-care habits, like not working on weekends, exercising regularly, or eating lunch.
Habit tracking and gamification are common features of life these days. Apps for all kinds of things let you set goals, track progress, and award you with badges when you hit certain milestones. If you have a competitive personality (I do not), this may work well for you.
It won’t work well for everyone.
What is a streak?
A streak is a measure of how many times you’ve done a thing without fail. In sports, it might be how many games won in a row (or maybe how many games without a loss, if draws are a thing). No team has a streak that lasts the whole season. No one expects to.
In habit formation, however, streaks often end up *becoming* the goal. I know someone who occasionally reports on how many continuous days she has practiced yoga. It’s well over 3 years now without even one day off. I’m glad this is working for her, but it seems to me to be a completely unreasonable expectation.
The common advice to write every day often gets interpreted as that kind of streak. Every day. 7 days a week. No breaks. No wonder there are so many people saying it’s bad advice. (It’s not. I’ll come back to that.)
Streaks may help establish a new habit
Establishing a new habit is difficult.
There are a few things you can do to make establishing a new habit easier and tracking streaks is one of those things. Watching the number go up can add a bit of extra motivation. There is even a point where dropping back to 0 is enough of a disincentive to push through some minor resistance.
Streaks are a tool. There are other tools. If this tool is helping, keep using it. If it stops working, stop using it.
When the streak becomes a problem
It is probably helpful to distinguish between establishing a new habit, and maintaining an existing habit. Inertia is a thing, even in habit formation. It’s harder to get started than to keep going once you’ve achieved some momentum.
Once you’ve established a habit, tracking your streak may do more harm than good.
If “losing the streak” becomes more important in your mind than the number of times you’ve done the thing you want to do, that’s a problem. It means that missing one day threatens to derail what is actually now an established habit.
If maintaining your streak means you start to compromise other things to do it, that’s also a problem.
Basically, if the point becomes maintaining your streak, you’ve lost the point. There was a reason you wanted to establish this habit. That reason is more important than your streak.
Now you know the danger signs, let’s focus on how to use this tool, streaks, to help you establish a habit.
How much activity “counts”?
I’m not saying everyone needs to dismiss tracking streaks altogether. If you know this kind of thing is motivating for you, especially in the early phase of establishing (or re-establishing) a habit, there are ways to mitigate some of the downsides.
One of these is to make the amount of activity that counts as small as possible. This is a good idea even if you are not worried about the streak. Starting small makes it easier to keep going regularly.
I wrote more about this in “Small steps yield big results” and used this principle when I created The 15 minute Per Day Academic Writing Challenge. I’ve also written about how I used these principles to establish my own daily yoga practice.
Redefine “success”
Just because you’ve set an intention to do something daily, doesn’t mean you need to achieve your intention 100% to be able to call it success.
In The 15 minute Per Day Academic Writing Challenge there is a section about goal setting that suggests identifying levels of success.
- What is an achievable goal based on where you are now?
- What is your minimum?
- Do you want to set a stretch goal?
The minimum is the bar where you feel like you aren’t really trying to establish this habit at all. The achievable goal might feel like too little (especially if you have perfectionist tendencies) but is the kind of thing you are pretty confident you can do with a small amount of effort.
Stretch goals need more thought. Reflect on how you respond to goals.
If a goal feels easy, is there a realistic risk you won’t even do enough to meet it? If so, a stretch goal is probably a good idea. It’ll give you the motivation you need.
Conversely, if you risk not trying hard enough because the goal seems impossible, you need to reduce your goal to something that feels feasible so you will put in the effort.
This latter point is also important when setting a stretch goal. You need to identify a goal that is enough of a stretch to motivate you to try, but not so unrealistic you will be demotivated by never getting there. And that goal you are reasonably confident you can reach, still counts as success even if you are aiming to exceed it.
The purpose of a goal, or a measure of success, is to motivate you. If the goals you’ve set are not motivating you, you need to change them.
Redefine “every day”
You get to decide what you mean by every day.
If we’re talking about establishing a writing habit, “write every day” might actually mean “write every working day”. This is especially true if you define “writing” as the writing that leads to research publications. This working week vs weekend/holiday distinction might also apply to other habits like getting dressed in a particular way.
Even my dog and cats are able to distinguish between weekends and weekdays in their expectations for what time people get up and feed them, and whether the dog goes to daycare. Your brain can definitely manage the same for work-related habits like writing.
For other habits, the definition of “every day” may be more about defining your success measure. Missing one day is not a failure.
As Lizzie Lasater put it (in relation to her yoga and meditation practice)
Sometimes, life is more important than practice and I miss a few days. Or weeks. But I’m learning to cultivate the softness to climb back onto my mat with grace. Not self-criticism or guilt. Just grace. (Lizzie Lasater, “Grace not guilt”)
Don’t let other people set your goals for you. (Other people includes: the designers of apps; or people who create “how to use this planner” tutorials.)
Know when to stop tracking the streak
In the beginning, establishing a habit requires a lot of conscious decision making. Once established, habits are subconscious.
As much as that friend’s posts about her 1000+ day streak makes me uncomfortable, I do have a daily yoga practice. I have had a daily yoga practice since early 2015.
What I don’t have is a continuous streak.
When we moved from Canada to the UK, I probably skipped a couple of weeks. I definitely didn’t do any when I had Covid. (Eating toast was too hard work. Yoga would have been a Very Bad Idea.) A couple of times a month, I skip one day.
The thing that makes me confident to say I have a daily practice, is that this habit is well established enough that I can pick it up again pretty easily.
- It doesn’t feel like starting all over again.
- I notice in my body when I haven’t done it.
- I miss it.
When a habit is established you are often more conscious of what it feels like not to do it. Or, you notice disruption.
If tracking streaks helps you establish a habit, then track streaks. You also want to celebrate long streaks, especially in the beginning when you start hitting double digits.
To avoid the problem of being demotivated by even a small break in your streak, you need other criteria for determining if you’ve reached the goal of establishing a habit. A good way to do this is to think about what it will feel like.
You don’t want to think about whether your habit is established all the time in the establishment phase. “Are we there yet?” doesn’t actually help you get there faster.
Decide how long you will work on your new thing, and track streaks, before you evaluate what’s going on more holistically. That might be “I’m going to try this for 6 weeks and then evaluate.”
Or, it might be “when I have a streak of 100, I need to evaluate whether streak tracking is still helping”.
You aren’t doing this for the streak.
There is a reason why you want to establish this habit. Make sure you are clear on that reason.
- You want to write more.
- You want to get more rest.
- You want to have more energy.
- You want to spend more time with your family and friends.
- [add your reason here]
If tracking a streak is helping you with that underlying thing, it’s a useful tool.
If tracking the streak means you’ve lost sight of why you are doing this thing in the first place, it’s no longer a useful tool.
If tracking the streak is making you feel like a failure about the thing you’re tracking, it’s no longer a useful tool.
If tracking the streak is making you feel like a failure about something else that is suffering to enable your success with the thing you are tracking, it’s no longer a useful tool.
Streaks can be helpful. Use them judiciously.
You can do this!
Related Posts:
Making writing less scary: Develop a habit
Squaring “write every day” with “take the weekend off”
The 15 minute/day Academic Writing Challenge
This post was originally sent to the General Newsletter on April 14th.
