I completely agree. If you just look at it as a system, it’s completely unstable. When do I most need support in my habits? When something goes wrong and I miss a day. When does a streak system completely remove all support and pile on a bunch of negativity? When something goes wrong and I miss a day.
Streaks seem to be good at taking you from 99% compliance to 100%, but that’s not the problem most people face.
What has worked way better for me is to take the world a week at a time. I track my compliance across all of my habits. It’s usually only like 75%, but I bet you most people aren’t hitting that. Then I meet someone for up to 30 minutes once a week. She’s not an accountability buddy (also an unstable system). She’s a project manager. We talk about what’s going wrong and how to fix it, or what’s going well and how to keep it. Done it all year and it has helped tremendously.
Back to streaks, I had an idea for streaks that still give you a goal, but they’re not so huge. So you reach for the next number in the powers of 2 or Fibonacci sequence, and your streak counter starts over when you hit it. Then you’re not trying to preserve your one precious streak, you’re just setting a new record. “I did 128, let’s see if I can hit 256!”.
A system that relies on things being ideal is likely to fail indeed. An alternative that works better than "Don't break the chain" is "Start again with the smallest and easiest step you can think of".
Hypothetical example: If you were working on running 21km and worked your way up to 14km but stopped for some reason. You could get started again with a short walk or just getting dressed to go for a walk.
I envy people that can freely share their thoughts / dreams / wishes on some random VM in some random cloud.
I don't even trust my connected devices since the amount of telemetry going on guarantees that everything I type will end up on some random VM in some random cloud.
Buy a small NUC and run some docker containers. You might end up sinking 100 hours into it, but I have the same concerns and self hosting (with some cloud backups, but encrypted) is the solution for me.
What's the point of having my own cloud as long as my devices are purposed built against my privacy?
AFAIK everything I type on my Windows machine is directly sent to MS servers. I assume the same for my Android phone.
Microsoft and Google ... I know it's the worst for privacy but my platform choices were made before I realized I was data mined.
I can't afford Apple, and frankly I think their privacy stance is more marketing than real care. Especially when I see the lengths they go to create a world were they OWN consumers.
Last Sunday I decided I had enough: I installed KDE Neon on my desktop. It failed to install drivers for my NVIDIA 950 gfx and proceeded to kill my sound card drivers in the process.
So I installed Elementary OS (yes complete opposite from Neon). Graphic drivers were fine, but every time it played a sound it was preceded by a loud crack in my speakers.
And it's not like it's fresh / unknown hardware, I assembled this PC between 2010 and 2012 (Intel Core i7 3770k on an Asus motherboard).
So I'm back on Windows, but at least it's a fresh install.
What software would you run to do this? I have been looking for a good habit/exercise tracker for a while and currently use Habitica. It is free(ish) but also does a poor job in surfacing what you did and history but has a good habit and daily model. I haven't yet found a good piece of software like it that is self hosted.
Thanks for the feedback. Safari and mobile view gives me strangely scaled picture as well. The actual calendar and graph seems to be fine. Definitely will keep this in mind for the next revision.
I have a feeling a better way to follow through your goals is to decouple tasks from the time it takes to do them. Divide your time in blocks, one tasks per block. The time doesn't depend on the task, and the task doesn't depend on which block you choose to do it.
For me, 3 blocks per day is optimum.
Interesting idea. For me the hardest thing is carving time out to do deep work at all. It’s critical to protect that time and focus on applying to a specific thing.
Exactly. Make space and the action will follow. Reminds me of a quote by John Carmack - “Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.”
Changing habits is hard and therefore requires time. Not sure a 7 days trial is enough to see the results therefore the value of the application. I would prefer not to invest time using a new application if I do not have enough time to assess the benefits from the time I invested in.
Feels like 7 days is enough to get the idea of the application, its philosophy, add the first few things I want to accomplish. Not more.
Trial should end when one small goal has been accomplished so that the user could realise he/she has accomplished a goal she wouldn't have without the application, plus in less time/easier than expected.
I find the reminders app on my phone is good enough.
I have a folder called "habits", with reminders that appear at chosen times of day and days of the week.
I look at my phone frequently enough that I can't really ignore them. My memory is crap enough that I forget what they're going to be, so I scroll through them once in a while. It's mildly satisfying for me to "check" them at the end of the day, and to write my 5-word summaries on progress or lack thereof in the notes app.
There was a comment posted on HN a while ago that has always stuck with me[0] that basically said that plain old pen, paper, and a system of rules was more than enough to start a business, organisation, or, as a follow up comment said, even Rome.
This has rung true in my life many times over. I've tried complicated note and habit tracking apps that just do far more than I ever need and I tend to get stuck in the weeds, missing the forest for the trees with these types of platforms. The default reminders app and notes app on my iPhone so far, has been more than sufficient for everything I've needed to tackle in life from moving overseas, starting a business, and fostering relationships as well as building every habit I currently have.
Basically, this is just a long winded way of saying "keep it simple"
> This has rung true in my life many times over. I've tried complicated note and habit tracking apps that just do far more than I ever need and I tend to get stuck in the weeds, missing the forest for the trees with these types of platforms.
Exactly. Use something simple that works for you. Design a system yourself if you can. Here is a system that works for me, either on paper and with a simple text editor in Markdown.
https://github.com/YJPL/personal-kanban
> if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem
One of the first things I do when on-boarding engineers to our business is to walk through the entire flow on paper, in terms of assets, people, and handshakes (as if there were no computers involved).
The industry my company's in is old enough that our competitors actually used to process everything with pen, paper, and stamps. technology made everything faster, but the water flows through the same pipes, so to speak.
Our programs are an incomplete and evolving map of a real-world transaction-territory, and it sometimes takes people a while to grok that. Once engineers do, they gain the ability to predict behavior in un-mapped territory. Having this ability saves everyone an immeasurable quantity of time.
I guess the most important takeaway, is that one must have distinct mental maps of the business process and of the program implementing the business process.
This obviously varies a lot depending on the technology you're building. Although, I guess even something as abstract as `malloc` can be analyzed in this way (a map for the program, and a map for the idea of the program: allocating memory).
I would also like to add one more thing that helps you to achieve goals: "Make it fun".
I don't like exercise but I love watching Netflix. Unfortunately, I don't get enough time to watch my favourite shows everyday.
Solution: Put a treadmill in front of my TV. Now I happily take out half an hour everyday to do the treadmill just so I get the same 30 minutes to watch my show.
For quite a while I used the rule that my favourite TV show could only be watched in the gym on my tablet. So if I wanted to really watch the latest episode of breaking bad or whatever it was I had to go to the gym and work out. It compelled me to get to the gym and stay exercising for 30+ minutes. Then I would also typically push out some strength on top of that cardio. Surprisingly effective to tie the two together and build a habit of it over a few months, starting initially lightly it can get you a long way.
If you want to lose weight it would be better to do your cardio after strength. By reversing your schedule you immediately start burning fat in your cardio because it generally takes 20 minutes before you start using these reserves.
I agree that the system is very important - perhaps even more than the goal; but your example is less then ideal. The system is the journey - something that can be done for eternity and doesn't necessarily "finish". "Build core functionalities" is not a system, "code for 3 hours each day" might be.
Note to the submitter: Firefox gives me a "Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead" message when I try to visit the link. Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER. Seems like a https certificate problem.
This is something I would definitely try if you had a free tier (just to get a feel of the app, maybe restricted to 1-2 goals) or at least a free trial without CC info/commitment.
But that doesn't convert enough! Think about all the $120/yr payments you can extract from people that don't know you can use an Excel spreadsheet to do the same thing!
I totally agree on this, the pricing is not well thought, take HabitBull for example, the app is free for 5 goals and you can unlock the rest of features with unlimited goals for a one time purchase of $10.
That's a way better pricing model for this kind of apps in my opinion.
This thing where you are supposed to take satisfaction from looking at a "chain" of repeated tasks on your calendar and feeling so bad for "breaking" the streak that you'll keep doing it. There are quite a few out there.
The effect on me is typically to increase my self-loathing when inevitably the chain breaks, and the feeling of "oh no, doing it all again will take so long!" discourages from picking myself up.
Chains don't really work the moment they get broken. Instead the alternate view that habits take about a month to form at least and you can only really change about 1% of a day every month is a better system that allows gaps and adjustments and systems built around our errors and unreliability and rewarding that long term habit building without the chain effect are a lot more effective long term.
Shameless plug: I teach people how to do exactly this at bizworklife.com. It's tool agnostic: just how to get control of your goals (geared mainly for startup entrepreneurs).
It started as an online course (that is still there) but has branched out a bit into personal consulting.
As soon as the chain is broken, I'm never going to pick it up again.