Break your daily streaks
Well-being 🌿 | Improve yourself 🏋️ | #Habits #Streaks #Progress
TL;DR
Break free from the pressure of maintaining daily streaks in your habits.
Focus on your overall completion rate instead of perfection on a daily basis.
Embrace imperfection, prioritise progress, and remember that you are human.
Seed
When striving to maintain daily habits, we often feel disheartened by breaking our long streaks. But we're only human, and occasional slip-ups are natural and shouldn't be judged harshly.
Instead of viewing the interruption of a daily streak as a failure, let's reconsider its significance. Is missing a single day truly a catastrophic setback, or are we being too hard on ourselves?
Consider the example of daily exercise. While skipping a day may slightly delay progress, it doesn't fundamentally hinder us from achieving our fitness or health goals. Most daily habits don't have life-or-death consequences.
Rather than fixating on daily streaks, focus on your overall weekly, monthly or quarterly completion rates. This provides a more meaningful and motivating measure of your consistent efforts towards reaching your objectives. If you break a 30 days streak but have a 97% completion rate in a month, should you really beat yourself up or should you be proud of your effort?
Recognise that you're human and imperfections are inevitable. Daily self-improvement habits are meant to enhance your life, not become a source of stress or self-blaming. Be compassionate and understanding with yourself.
If the idea of missing a day makes you really uncomfortable, you can set up strategies. For instance, you can set elastic habits with different levels of achievement, adapted to your situation. You can also consider compensating by doing a little extra the following day. Remember, taking action, even if it falls short of your original plan, is always better than doing nothing at all.
Of course, some people thrive with the daily streak challenges. The important question to ask yourself is: what is the cost-benefit balance of keeping the streak?
Don't let daily streaks demotivate you or undermine the positive impact of your habits. Shifting your focus to completion rates empowers you to improve yourself while embracing your humanity. Progress, not perfection, should be your guiding principle. Remember, you are human, and your growth is a constant, evolving process.
Example
There was a time when I was using Duolingo. I was doing my daily exercises, feeling great about my progress. And one day at a time, I started to feel very competitive. There’s something really addictive about this app, they really push you to do more and more, which is good for you to progress, but might steer you away from your original goal. In my case, I wanted to learn daily, and casually. But I realised that this daily streak started to become a source of stress. Missing one single day was making me feel like a failure. And using the streak freeze was making me feel like I was cheating.
And I heard that I wasn’t the only one feeling pressured by the app. So at some point, I decided to let go of the daily streak. I voluntarily stopped for a few days to lose it. And instead, I started logging my progress in a separate habit-tracking app, giving me my monthly completion rate. Interestingly, this allowed me to use other resources than Duolingo to learn the language I was working on and still keep logging this progress in my habit app.
It just started to feel like Duloingo’s features were not helping me, as a user, but profiting Duolingo, ensuring that I would be tied to the app every single day.
Bonus
To track your habits and completion rate, there are plenty of apps out there. And I’d like to talk about one that I’ve been using for a few years now: TickTick.
The core of this app is more about To-do lists, but it has so many features, it makes it a nice and complete solution as a productivity tool. I also appreciate the fact that you can install it on any device (iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac)
They have a free plan where you can log up to 5 habits if you want to try it.