How Streaks Encourage Failure

Streaks are the little number that increases each time you do an action. One of the most common apps that uses streaks to motivate you is a gamified language learning app Duolingo, which places a lot of importance on the number of days in a row you’ve practised your language. Now streaks promote two entirely opposite behaviours. On the one hand, they encourage you to practice every day, because you don’t want to see that lovely high number fall back down to zero.

Streaks might also help because of the cognitive bias that makes people follow their past decisions. If I’ve practised French for the past 87 days has, then why wouldn’t I now?

These two both very much help when your streak is already thriving, but what about when you miss a day? When you forget because of some crazy circumstance? Well, your number will depressingly drop back down to zero, and the explanation given for this is that it will encourage you to work back up to your previous number, but it feels like an incredible drag to get back up to that number. It makes it feel as if your practicing for the sake of getting that number back up to what it was before, not for the sake of the practice. The first time you push a boulder up a hill, its work, but its satisfying work. The second time, not so much. 

Or, the other thing that’ll go through your mind when you miss a streak is that it gives you a bit of a break, because your number is already on zero, so what damage could leaving it on zero for another day be? As far as you know, none. And that’s bad. Without some kind of punishment, streaks encourage lazing around on a streak of zero days, rather than encouraging hopping back onto the bandwagon, despite the fact that hopping back onto the bandwagon is perhaps the most important factor in sticking to your goals.

For all these reasons that streaks encourage failure, I reccomend a different method of recording how many times you complete a task. Which is a calendar.

My Calendar. As you can see, I lost my nice highlighter on the 23rd of June. 😦

How to track with a calendar

This idea is a slight variation of from Reinhard Engel’s, the faceless creator of the nosdiet, which is an ingenious system that I’ve been following for months. What you do is print out a calendar. For every day where you complete the habit you want to form, you mark it green. On the days where you fail, you mark it red. Simple! And with that simple system, you fix all the problems.

You’re still totally motivated to do your habits, because of the utter shame and disappointment you get from having to mark the entire day as a failure just because you were a little too lazy to stick your goals proves to be an incredibly powerful motivator. And the most important thing is that if you miss a day, you aren’t encouraged to fail! Instead, just like how you can have multiple green days in a row, you can have multiple red days in a row.

My calendar is stuck right in the centre of my room, so I see it in almost every task I do. Last month I failed only on the 9th and the 24th, and the constant visible reminder won’t let the circumstances of the failure leave my mind. By marking what you’ve done, you make yourself accountable to your future self. And no one wants their future self to think that their current self was a lazy dingus who failed to work out 4 days in a row.

I also recommend noting down the circumstances of each of your failures, because (I know this’ll sound cheesy) but you can learn from your mistakes, and each month’ll hopefully end up looking greener than the last.

I have it set up so that I have 5 trackers on Strides. If any of those habits aren’t met, it’s a red day. Finally I have a system for moderating my Youtube and Reddit use, and if I circumnavigate those systems, it’s a red day. And out of 5 and a half months tracked, I have 20 red days, which I think isn’t too bad. 

Now this can all be done online, and Reinhard Engels has made a rather outdated web app called HabitCal for this exact purpose, though I don’t recommend it because of the extra friction involved in checking and adding to your calendar. Sometimes good old fashioned paper is the way to go.

So, that’s about it. Don’t rely on an ever-increasing number to keep you motivated. Instead, paint a picture of your successes that you can look to for motivation at any moment.

–  Gingerjumble

The Upside of Irrationality – Review

The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

If a book is good, I’ll never want to read it again. If a book’s great, it’ll make me put it down and simply think about the sheer power the book just laid upon me. This book lies somewhere in the middle, because the second I finished it there were about a thousand thoughts in my head commanding me to pick it right back up and consume all that juicy information all over again. That’s how jam-packed this rollercoaster of a book is. It jumps from topic to topic, all managing to highlight how interestingly inconsistent humans are with our reactions. This book feels like it’s putting my brain against me in an endless war to be rational, but we both end up losing in the end. This book deconstructs every instinct I constructed about myself and with extensive evidence builds a newer, more accurate image of how our relationships with our own brains are quite one-sided, yet provides ways for us to use them to our advantage. An amazingly insightful read that is bumping its way up to the top of my re-reading list for sure.

Rating –  👍👍

 

Predictably Irrational – Review

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Sometimes I find it a challenge to switch from Podcasts to an audiobook, due to the impersonality (and the usual boringness) that comes with them. But with Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, it feels like the book was written as a conversation of a person who’s incredibly interested in his study, and who does a magnificent job at making the reader just as interested. The book is an anthology of experiments as Ariely and his coworkers at MIT university prove how even though we don’t realise it, human beings are very much irrational creatures and he definitely proves it. The book follows a question every chapter, and he does a good job at following every query through to its logical conclusion, and leaves the reader feeling satisfied with the answer. A short info filled read, and the rest of this author’s books are definitely going on my reading list. 

Rating – 👍

The Best Messaging App – (Discord vs Snapchat vs Whatsapp)

I have too many messaging apps. Unfortunately, the people I talk to are spread thin and aren’t all on the same platform (which would be preferable), so I have three messaging apps on my phone, and I’m here today to find which one is the best.

Snapchat is inherently a social media platform, with messaging features built in. WhatsApp is an alternative for SMS messaging that uses wifi to send messages rather than your credit, and Discord is an online messaging and socialising platform that was designed with gamers in mind. All three have messaging and calling features, so get ready for a detailed ranking on all the important things a messaging app should have. Enjoy!

Accessibility

1.  In first place for accessibility is Discord, for being able to be accessed on any device with access to the internet., but you need to confirm your email EVERY TIME you log in from a new browser, which is really a hassle when I’m trying to sneakily check my messages from a school computer.

2.  WhatsApp has a really frustrating solution to having access from anything else than a phone, which is that you scan a QR code EVERY TIME you want to access it from a computer, and you scan the QR code from your phone, so if you have your phone available it defeats the need of using it on your desktop! And don’t be fooled by the keep me signed in button. It does nothing.

3.  Snapchat doesn’t have any way to access it from anything else than a mobile device (like phones and tablets), which isn’t great.