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Comment by mhartl | Hacker News Reader

The "don't break the chain" rule is brittle: if you do break the chain, your motivation can crater. I think [Beeminder](http://beeminder.com/) has a clever solution to this problem; it gives you a way to track and enforce your goals while being robust to the occasional lapse.

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I haven't found this. Because I can still see a calendar that shows all the days I hit my goal, my motivation doesn't suddenly evaporate if I miss a day. One of the keys I think is setting goals that you can't fail at. So rather than "go to gym" which is a hard habit to form, you could start with "do 10 pushups". Eventually once the habit has formed you can step it up, but it's far more valuable to win/succeed every day than it is to accomplish lots on one day then laps for 5.

EDIT: for example here are my current widgets for the My Chains app on android: https://db.tt/pYRrrPZs you'll notice they're pretty quick and easy, but there are quite a few of them. This gives me a tremendous sense of achievement and progress which has been invaluable in the quest to form better habits.

On a side note... neat skin... what is that?

You mean the wallpaper? Just one of the default things on the old xperia sk17a :)

Well, I thought the whole corner groupings was neat. Novel compared to stock android, which is what I've been running for a couple of years.

Oh yeah the corner groupings are rad. best thing about the xperia is the keyboard though... I can't stand touch screens!! Although my ideal form factor is candybar the only other phone in existence that does what I need is the Motorola Pro+ which is really fragile. I currently have like 4 xperia sk17a's ... Stockpiling them like a survivalist.

Another side note - where is the "My Chains" app? The app store doesn't know it...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.lixi.mychai...

Sorry it's MyChain

Another way to structure the chain is a chain of unbroken weeks, instead of days, especially for actions that stand a pretty good chance of being derailed by life. Like going to the gym. Mark a week as "checked off" if you hit the gym for at least 3 of the 7 days. That way you've got several "buffer days" to act as a cushion.

This is the sort of thing Beeminder effectively automates.

That has to be one of the most interesting monetization ideas I've seen in quite some time. Pretty genius (I'm assuming the money if you go off track goes to them) :D

I worry about that a lot. But I think that brittleness may be what makes me work so hard to not break it.

I agree, that's what happened to me. Now I have a rule to not go 2 days without working on one of my coding project, so if I miss a day I don't get discouraged.

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