Success in most things requires consistency over a long period of time. Most of us know this. Yet, consistency is hard. As much as we want to achieve our goals, sometimes we’re tired, or would rather do something else.
Today it’s become harder to remain consistent. Our attention is hooked by things designed to be addictive. One such addictive design mechanism is streaks e.g. Snapchat streaks.
But we can use this gamification technique to hook us into doing the things we actually want to or should do.
What are Streaks?
A streak is a consecutive sequence of days, or weeks you complete some particular task. An example could be “take vitamins”, “don’t smoke” or “write a blog post”.
Measuring streaks is simple. All you need to do is note down the days you’ve completed the task, and increment the streak count each day you’ve done it. What makes a streak a streak is that if you miss a day, the streak counter resets to 0. This resetting to 0 is exactly what makes streaks such a powerful motivation tool.
Why do Streaks work?
Our biases
Streaks are exploiting some of the more primitive parts of brain for our benefit. One such reason is our bias for loss aversion. We’d rather not lose than win.
Thus, rather than relying on our grit to keep at our goals, why not rely on this stronger fear of losing progress. When you have a streak of 10 days, you want to keep going to 11, and not reset all the way back to 0! Otherwise it feels like a whole 10 days of progress is lost.
You get what you measure
Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost
H. Thomas Johnson
By measuring our total progress, it becomes visible and something we can direct our progress towards.
We shouldn’t just track the current number of our streaks, but keep the whole record of the days we hit and the days we missed. We can then combine this with other data to see where we tend to fall off. Do you always fail to practice guitar on Fridays, because you stay for drinks after work? Perhaps you can find a way to practice in the morning.
Rewards
Each time we complete a task, we get a little hit of dopamine. We see the number go up and we feel a little better. By creating these psychological rewards, we make these streak actions a little addictive. It works for facebook notifications, it can work for you.
How can I measure my Streaks?
You can track it in a journal, your notes app, or what I recommend, using an app like STREAKS reducing the friction and potentially putting this newfound knowledge over the Usefulness Threshold.
It’s important that the definition of the task or action is clear and action based, not outcome based. For example, a bad goal is “win 5 chess games a week”, a better goal is “play 5 chess games a week”. Goals that are outside of your control are less robust and therefore less motivating. Losing progress when it’s not your fault is just annoying.
Sometimes, the streak is built right into the app for you, like in language learnings apps Lingq and Duolingo.
Losing a Streak
What if you can’t continue your streak? Life happens and you’re forced to reset that counter from 50 to 0. What now?
You no longer care. You’re streak is 0. Missing another day now doesn’t result in any further loss of progress. So you can continue your streak of inaction. Right?
Measure total progress
Losing a streak can be quite demotivating. This is why it’s useful to measure the total days of hits and misses. You can see that in the last 50 days, you have a 98% hit rate! Now missing a second day in a row might not impact your streak, but it will drop your overall consistency percentage, so you keep at it.
Pausing your Streak
Another way to overcome this is to pause your streak. A day that doesn’t continue your streak but it doesn’t destroy your streak either. While it may seem like a cheap and easy way out of being lazy, one study suggests that providing some slack on short term goals, increases perceived progress towards their long term goal, thus avoiding this potential slip into multiple days of misses, because of the “no progress is lost” mentality. STREAKS, Lingq and Duolingo have the ability to pause/freeze a streak built in.
A good rule of thumb: when you miss a streak because of something outside of your control, it’s a day you can pause, when it’s within your control, you should mark it as a miss – but remember your total progress! Be honest with yourself. If your data is accurate you can make better decisions about how to improve your progress longer term.
Now
My weekly streak of blog posts just hit six. I’m certain I wouldn’t have written this one if not for facing the disappointment of resetting five weeks of progress.
