Sure, a couple of examples of tasks that ended up lapsing on beeminder (certainly plus points for beeminder for allowing me to see my behavior in charts!)
https://www.beeminder.com/lambdaloop/anki
- reviewing some number of anki cards each day (lapsed after ~2 months, recovered but lapsed after 2 months again and stopped)
(goal was private when archived, but yah similar trajectory)
- doing weekly reviews (lapsed after ~5 months)
Did you ever set larger goals? What was the purpose of doing those things? Did it build towards something? What were the milestones you were measuring or overarching purpose?
I would probably die of boredom and give up too after a while if it was "Some seemingly pointless small task repeated daily with no larger goal to work towards as a means to measure when I had done enough or keep me motivated and clear why I should continue to do this."
I suppose each of the habits that I tried to build generally improved my life, but I'm not sure that I've setup clear milestones to work towards. That's something that has worked well in personal projects, so I'll give it a shot for habits as well! Thank you for the feedback!
It's hard to answer about overarching purpose. The habits I highlighted each help towards some purpose (organizing my life, learning languages), but only form some portion of that goal.
1. A milestone that marks when you have done "enough" and can quit without feeling like you failed.
2. A metric that reinforces the idea that "I need to keep doing this to avoid bad things or to get good things. When I stop, things I don't desire happen instead."
Without one of those, you will tend to have some internal, subconscious thing go either "Yup, I've gotten what I needed and can't be bothered with this anymore." or "This is pointless drivel and doing nothing and wasting my time, and I can't be bothered with this anymore."
I suspect that setting “method goals” isn’t particularly stable in general; they aren’t tied to any values or principles so it’s always easy to drop them.
