Habit formation is an important tool for productivity. If something is important, then it’s probably worth doing it regularly. Writers write daily, dancers dance daily, and so on.
There are many techniques for doing things daily. A simple one relies on creating a streak and switching your focus to maintenance (See Don’t Break the Chain by Todoist). Eventually, the chain itself becomes the motivation for doing it regularly.
People generally love maintaining a streak, a psychological trait that social media take advantage of. Reddit has a streak for interacting with the website, Duolingo has a streak for the number of days you practiced for 5 minutes, and Snapchat for the number of days you messaged a particular person. This feature is quite effective, to be honest. I admit that I used to open the Reddit app right after opening my eyes in the morning just to maintain my interaction streak (eventually it broke and I have since been avoiding starting another streak again).
While everyone talks about the upside of streaks, we silently ignore the downsides of it:
- Trying to maintain a streak is stressful.
- Once it becomes long enough, we start prioritizing the streak over the task. This results in doing meaningless actions just to continue the streak.
- When the streak breaks, the thought of building the streak again becomes an obstacle.
Streak is ultimately a tool. We should be careful about how we utilize it. One way of reducing the downside (while maintaining the upsides) is to try doing things daily-ish instead. It’s fine to not do the task absolutely every day. Life is chaotic and it is possible to miss a day here and there, as long as we get back right into it again, the missed days are not statistically significant.
A daily-ish commitment has flexibility baked into it. It’s much more resilient than setting a process where a mistake can end the whole thing. Once you switch your mindset, a streak break won’t demotivate you. We can continue to streak indefinitely, as long as we are honest with ourselves (don’t do something only twice a week and think it counts as daily-ish).
I have committed to writing a blog post every week, but I already missed one last week. If it was before, I would have been devastated thinking I wasn’t disciplined or committed enough for this. I would have even procrastinated for a few more weeks thinking “Since I missed one week, I might as well take a long break and come back stronger later”. But now that I have shifted to a weekly-ish cadence, such misses no longer bother me. I can get back on my feet much quicker.