I Started Tracking a Habit and It Immediately Got Worse

I tracked a daily reading habit for a year. The first eleven weeks were the best reading I have done as an adult. What happened over the following months is the reason I no longer track anything with a streak.

The mechanism is not mysterious and I could have predicted it if I had thought about it. A streak makes the measure the goal. For eleven weeks the measure and the goal coincided, because the only way to mark the day was to read. Then one evening I was tired at eleven o’clock with the day unmarked, and I read one page, and marked it. The streak survived, honestly, by my own rule. And once that had happened once, it had a place in the repertoire.

Within two months, roughly a third of my marked days were one-page days. My streak was the longest it had ever been and my actual reading had fallen below where it was before I started tracking. The number went up as the thing went down, which is a specific and well-known failure and which I did not notice for weeks because the number was reassuring me daily.

What I find most interesting, looking back, is that I was not cheating and never felt like I was. Every entry was true. The measure was simply capturing something that had drifted away from what I cared about, and the drift was invisible precisely because the measure kept saying things were fine.

The change I made was to stop measuring occurrence and start measuring the thing I actually wanted. For reading, that is pages, recorded weekly rather than daily. Weekly because a daily number reintroduces the pressure to make each day non-zero, which is where the one-page day came from. A weekly total absorbs a bad Tuesday without anything being at stake, and it cannot be satisfied by a token.

The general rule I took from it, which I have since applied to two other things: if your measure can be satisfied by a gesture, it will eventually be satisfied by a gesture, and you will not notice when that starts. So the test for a measure is not whether it is motivating. It is whether the cheapest way to satisfy it is also a version of the thing you want.

Daily marks fail this badly for anything with a quantity — reading, exercise, writing. They work well for things that are genuinely binary and where a token version does not exist: taking a medication, making the bed, not doing something. I still track two things daily and both are in that category.

The other adjustment I would suggest is to keep the number somewhere you look weekly rather than somewhere you look every time you open your phone. My streak was on my home screen for eleven weeks and it was the last thing I saw each night, and I now think that constant visibility was what made protecting the number matter more than the reading. The weekly page count lives in a note I open on Sundays, and I have never once felt anything about it except mild interest, which is the correct amount of feeling to have about a measurement.