streaks are bullshit

Trying to form a habit by tracking a daily streak reinforces the wrong behaviour. It focuses on the habit itself, instead of the goal reached by the habit ("I will write every day" vs "I want to write a blog article I'm proud of").

Keeping a streak feels great, but what about missing a day? Now there's something to lose and starting again from zero feels /bad/. It feels bad enough that you might not bother tomorrow, or the day after. Missing a day shouldn't mean you've "failed" the habit. Sometimes life gets in the way, sometimes you just plain forget.

This is also why new year's resolutions fail. A resolution like "I will stop doing X" has a built in failure state. If you do X three days later, the resolution has failed and can be forgotten.

As well as making failure feel bad, streaks can push you to half-arse the habit, to keep the streak.

A long time ago I used the website 750 Words to try and become a better writer, by writing every day.

750 Words

To keep the streak you have to finish by midnight, and 750 words is /a lot/ to write every day. If I didn't start by 11:30 it would be a struggle to finish. Often I'd write a few hundred words, then start typing stream of consciousness nonsense until I hit the word count. On a few occasions I just typed gibberish as quickly as possible to not break the streak. Unsurprisingly, this didn't help me become a better writer.

Streaks are bullshit, the goal isn't the habit, the habit is in service of the goal.

gate

2020-08-24