Streakers of the world, unite!

Nothing beats a good habit.

For those looking for a self-help group (or appreciation group 🤔) of running naked on a football field, I’m sure there’s a subreddit for that. I’m talking about the routines apps and platforms like to force you in to get at least a daily check-in. If they succeed in doing so, they established a very powerful thing. In this sense, it’s a marketing lesson.

Privacy is important, but a streak even more so.

My 15 yo son left for summer camp the other day. As any kid he’s rather keen on his privacy. His phone is his private space, and so is his laptop. As these things are an extension of your mere self, I can understand the flashes of a developing teenage brain are not something you like to share with the world. And certainly not with your parents!

Yet, just before he left he handed me the passcode for his iPhone, together with an instruction video. He wants me, he needs me, to keep the streak alive with a dozen or so friends on Snapchat. Something needs to be sent daily, and they have to send something back. The funny thing is, part of this streak group are his friends who are with him on that same summer camp. So what we have is a bunch of parents sending pictures to each other 😃

Random picture from the interwebs, not my son’s list. The flames indicate a streak.

Because that’s the trick they figured out: if you take a picture with Snapchat you can send it to a bunch of people without the need to go in the specific conversations. This is their way to try to limit the privacy invasion, which I respect, so I don’t see what the other parents are sending. Still, I got the keys, if I would want to, I could do anything in his absence.

The chaotic brain

Funny as it is, I can totally relate. My own life is packed with little habits that drive my wife crazy. For me, these are musts, and that’s what she doesn’t like about them. Yet for me they’re critical, a way to structure my rather chaotic brain.

So maybe this is a thing that especially relates to chaotic-brain people, or maybe it’s more universal. I don’t know, I can only fall back on my own experience of course.

Here’s a list of things I need to do daily to not get anxious:

• 10k steps a day. I’m currently on a 394 day streak. My longest streak before that was 734 days, and I end up failing it one day with just a few steps left. Dramatic. Before that I had another about 2-years streak and it got killed because a technical issue with my watch. I would have paid someone a decent amount of money to fix it. It wasn’t fair!
  So I’m doing this for some 5 years. A crazy amount of steps.

• Duolingo. 2123 days streak (and also ended one before by accident). On top of that a couple of friends streaks from about a year.

• Podcast. I do a daily podcast, at least for this year. Haven’t missed a day.

• The latest, I’m on an 82-days Zip streak on LinkedIn, a little connect the dots game that tells you you’re smarter than 75% of CEO’s if you happen to do it fast ;-)

A habit on steroids

Charles Duhigg’s classic book The Power of Habit (2012) zooms in on habits, how they work, how to make them and break them (by changing them, bad habits like smoking for example). He describes what he calls a habit loop. It starts with a cue, followed by a routine (the execution of the habit) and ends in a reward (typically a feeling). Because the cue and reward get intertwined, you develop a craving resulting in a powerful base for the habit to form.

A streak, to me, is a habit on steroids. A habit with a counter. In a typical habit, it doesn’t matter that much is you skip a beat. If the habit is strong (and not still forming) there won’t be any impact and you just pick up the next time. In a streak this is different. The streak itself, the number, becomes the craving. That’s why a streak becomes more powerful over time: (unintentionally) losing a 10-day streak takes you less than 2 weeks to rebuild, but a 1000-day streak is a different thing. Some kind of loss aversion is kicking in.

This is also the weak point of a steak: if it’s gone, it’s gone. Since the number is the craving, no craving without the number. I literally experienced that myself, in between streaks. When I failed my Duolingo as well as my 10k-steps streaks, I always had a pauze before I started again (kind of an existential crisis even, what’s the point anyway!?). Sometimes just a few days, but sometimes weeks or longer. You need a conscious decision to start again.

Photo by Hailey wright on Unsplash

Duolingo must have noticed. And that’s why I believe they introduced something called a streak freeze. If your streak is long enough (as in, to long to restart from zero if you fail) you will collect wildcards that will be used as some kind of pauze button when you fail the streak. So you’re not loosing your big number. A powerful concept, especially as you know that I’ve used them, a few times by now, and none was intentionally. LinkedIn has taken over this freeze concept in their casual games as well.

For the 10k-steps a day however, there’s no such thing. At least not in the Garmin ecosystem I’m using. So I’m hyper aware!

If it isn’t measured, it doesn’t count

I have other habits. Things I do daily (like drinking coffee) or regularly (like solving Sudoku’s on my phone). The Sudoku thing is great to dig in a bit deeper. There too you have daily challenges. There too you have rewards, and scores, timings, rankings, .. but there’s no streak counter.

A daily challenge is just a challenge a day. A new puzzle. But there’s no need to do today’s puzzle today. I can just as well make it tomorrow, or in year for what it’s worth. So sometimes it’s a habit, but it just as easily goes to the back burner. The funny thing is, the Sodoku app is my go-to when I have some time to kill, but only if I know my streak list is checked (and/or if I’m in the position to do so).

In a streak there’s no such thing as compensating. If you did 20k steps yesterday, but only managed 8k today, you failed. There is no in-between. All or nothing, or it doesn’t work.

The streak number can become an even bigger motivator if you bring it external. Just as with the friend streaks on my son’s snapchat the number becomes more significant if it’s shared. If you fail your streak, you’re not only failing yourself. And as long as you keep succeeding, you know you have an audience. While for me personally this isn’t the biggest reason, it sure helps you to get an extra motivator.
That’s why it’s a good idea if you want to achieve something, to do it publicly and report on it. A good product has this built-in and does it for you?

Doability

So I think you get the picture of what makes up a good strike: it should be countable, you can’t cheat, you get daily reminders .. and it helps if it’s something you don’t dislike doing. But even there we can argue .. if it’s something you want to do (for example for your health) but don’t particularly enjoy, I believe a streak can be a shortcut into forming it into a habit.

But equally important, it needs to be feasible. You need to have the time for it, the energy, the tools, access, ..

I can try to establish a running streak, and go for a daily 10k jogging session, but you know that’s not gonna last: it takes up too much time and you will need to rest your body from time to time. Not saying that it’s impossible to form running into a streak, if the willpower is there and you can organize yourself, nearly anything is possible. But this is the crux of the matter: the easier the investment, to more likely you will succeed and keep on going.

Photo by Jelly Dollar on Unsplash

I’d love to turn this Substack writing into a streak, but first let’s try to turn it into a habit 😉

And now I need to go for a walk, I've only done 3000 steps 😱

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