I have written before about habit formation and the longest chain or streak. The idea is simple: decide to do something (concrete) every day and measure how many days in a row you did that. Just don’t break the chain… go for the longest streak possible. I found this a useful approach for getting into daily habits.
There’s one problem, though: Once I have a long chain and break it, it seems hard to get started and going again. Say my daily task is to learn one new word. Every day I note for how many days I have been doing this. Say I’ve done 61 days in a row, and then break the chain. After a day or two (or so), I get back to studying new words. Now, after three days the incentives aren’t very strong. It’s still very far to get to the longest chain; if I don’t study, I only ‘lose’ three days — not much. (The incentives are quite difference when my chain is longest: now there’s everything to ‘lose’. This is why the whole thing works.)
What’s the solution? Don’t seek to do your best every time: go better than your average. This means that in addition to recording your current chain or streak, you also keep track of all the other chains. We still try not to break the chain, but there’s a secondary goal to better the average. (And if we use the geometric mean for the average, there’s even not that much information to be tracked)
Didier Ruedin 