I have a lot of habit streaks. Some of the streaks I have going at the moment:
Studied Anki cards for Chinese every day for 8 months*
Meditated every day for the past 1.5 years*
Flossed every day for 6+ months*
In fact I think quite a lot of my identity is connected to these streaks at this point, and that’s part of what sustains them[1]. But there are a lot of other things you can do to make habits and their associated streaks more sustainable.
It’s helpful if they are small enough and flexible enough to be done even on days where you are extra busy, or forgot about them until the evening. It’s good to schedule time for them in advance, both so you have a designated time to start, and so you know you’ll have enough time to finish. It can help to do the habit literally every day so you don’t have to think about whether today’s a day to do it, and so the streak feels more visceral. It’s also helpful if you actually want to do the habit, because it’s enjoyable or clearly linked to your larger goals.
Here I want to focus on what to do if, god forbid, you do actually break a habit streak. There’s an argument to be made that planning for what to do in the event of a break makes it psychologically easier to then skip a day. A lot of the power of a habit streak comes from making it unthinkable to break the streak. I think this is true, but accidents happen. Sometimes you just plumb forget, or are sick, or are on a transatlantic flight and the concept of well-defined, discrete days starts to break down. And, as may be obvious, the value of habit streaks comes not from having a perfect unbroken chain, but from consistently doing the activity. So one of the most important parts is how to recover.
To me, the primary line of defense is: don’t fail twice[2]. Put in a special effort the next day to make sure that you actually perform the habit. Make it your primary goal, leave extra time for it, and get it done. If you’ve done that, and you get right back on the streak, then I think you should give yourself permission to think of the streak as still alive. (You may have noticed asterisks in my initial list of habits – for all three of those, I have had a day where it’s at least ambiguous whether I did the habit: for Anki, I just totally forgot on one day while I was traveling; for meditation, it was, ironically enough, the first day of a meditation retreat, and we didn’t do a formal sit; for flossing, I was on a flight to London and slept on the plane.)
But what if you’re really sick, or something unexpected happens, and you miss two days in a row? This is where I think it’s helpful to hold a hierarchy of goals in mind at once. You could decide to care about keeping the habit alive at multiple levels:
By shifting focus to a higher level goal, there’s always something at stake – you can’t just say “Oh well, the streak’s over, I guess there’s no point continuing until I decide to make a new streak.” There’s always some nearby goal that you could meaningfully affect; it’s never time to fail with abandon. Even if you broke the streak, you can revive it. And even if you missed twice, you can aim for a good month. And even if the month starts off badly, you shouldn’t write the whole month off because that’d damage your long-run average.
There are a bunch of variations you could do on which specific metrics to track, and how much to weight each in your definition of “doing a good job at the habit”. But honestly I don’t think it matters to get the incentive perfectly right, and in fact maintaining some strategic ambiguity there might be helpful – it’ll be harder for your subconscious to exploit the details of your system. For me, collecting enough data that I could in theory compute whatever metrics is helpful enough, without actually having to do it (partly because I haven’t failed my habits enough recently to make that necessary, not to brag or anything.)
I’m not sure how to articulate how it feels to actually change the shape of your motivational system so it reflects these rules. A lot of it feels like subtly manipulating my motivational system by strategically making different things salient. The whole purpose of building streaks is to make a deal with an irrational part of the mind to achieve our rational goals, and trying to analyze it in rational terms often falls flat.
I have a lot of habit streaks. Some of the streaks I have going at the moment:
In fact I think quite a lot of my identity is connected to these streaks at this point, and that’s part of what sustains them [1] . But there are a lot of other things you can do to make habits and their associated streaks more sustainable.
It’s helpful if they are small enough and flexible enough to be done even on days where you are extra busy, or forgot about them until the evening. It’s good to schedule time for them in advance, both so you have a designated time to start, and so you know you’ll have enough time to finish. It can help to do the habit literally every day so you don’t have to think about whether today’s a day to do it, and so the streak feels more visceral. It’s also helpful if you actually want to do the habit, because it’s enjoyable or clearly linked to your larger goals.
Here I want to focus on what to do if, god forbid, you do actually break a habit streak. There’s an argument to be made that planning for what to do in the event of a break makes it psychologically easier to then skip a day. A lot of the power of a habit streak comes from making it unthinkable to break the streak. I think this is true, but accidents happen. Sometimes you just plumb forget, or are sick, or are on a transatlantic flight and the concept of well-defined, discrete days starts to break down. And, as may be obvious, the value of habit streaks comes not from having a perfect unbroken chain, but from consistently doing the activity. So one of the most important parts is how to recover.
To me, the primary line of defense is: don’t fail twice [2] . Put in a special effort the next day to make sure that you actually perform the habit. Make it your primary goal, leave extra time for it, and get it done. If you’ve done that, and you get right back on the streak, then I think you should give yourself permission to think of the streak as still alive. (You may have noticed asterisks in my initial list of habits – for all three of those, I have had a day where it’s at least ambiguous whether I did the habit: for Anki, I just totally forgot on one day while I was traveling; for meditation, it was, ironically enough, the first day of a meditation retreat, and we didn’t do a formal sit; for flossing, I was on a flight to London and slept on the plane.)
But what if you’re really sick, or something unexpected happens, and you miss two days in a row? This is where I think it’s helpful to hold a hierarchy of goals in mind at once. You could decide to care about keeping the habit alive at multiple levels:
By shifting focus to a higher level goal, there’s always something at stake – you can’t just say “Oh well, the streak’s over, I guess there’s no point continuing until I decide to make a new streak.” There’s always some nearby goal that you could meaningfully affect; it’s never time to fail with abandon. Even if you broke the streak, you can revive it. And even if you missed twice, you can aim for a good month. And even if the month starts off badly, you shouldn’t write the whole month off because that’d damage your long-run average.
There are a bunch of variations you could do on which specific metrics to track, and how much to weight each in your definition of “doing a good job at the habit”. But honestly I don’t think it matters to get the incentive perfectly right, and in fact maintaining some strategic ambiguity there might be helpful – it’ll be harder for your subconscious to exploit the details of your system. For me, collecting enough data that I could in theory compute whatever metrics is helpful enough, without actually having to do it (partly because I haven’t failed my habits enough recently to make that necessary, not to brag or anything.)
I’m not sure how to articulate how it feels to actually change the shape of your motivational system so it reflects these rules. A lot of it feels like subtly manipulating my motivational system by strategically making different things salient. The whole purpose of building streaks is to make a deal with an irrational part of the mind to achieve our rational goals, and trying to analyze it in rational terms often falls flat.
Discussed in Atomic Habits. ↩︎
Probably also discussed in Atomic Habits. ↩︎